Full Session Description

Errors are inevitable. As engineering teams scale and build out their applications, the collection of software errors grows in parallel. We all know that errors are bad, but have you ever considered that not all bugs are worth fixing? The concept of racking up errors for the sake of fast-paced development is referred to as technical debt. So how do you manage your technical debt, protect valuable time at work, and help reduce costs? In this session, James Smith, Co-founder & CEO of Bugsnag, will walk you through hacks and tricks that involve establishing:1) a common language for discussion between engineering, product, QA, release management, and observability teams 2) a method to measure error impact and application health via stability scores. This talk explains how a data-driven approach provides a unified answer to the age-old question: Do we fix bugs or build new features?

James Smith

Co-Founder and CEO @ Bugsnag

About the author

James Smith, is CEO and Co-Founder of Bugsnag, the leader in full-stack software stability management. Prior to founding Bugsnag in 2012, James was the CTO at Heyzap and was instrumental in scaling Heyzap from a 3-person company, to the world’s largest mobile gaming community and mobile ads platform with over 10 million users. James has also worked at Bloomberg and has created a number of popular open source projects (https://github.com/loopj), which are used by companies such as Twitter, Pinterest and Trello. He has a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Math from the University of Bath in the UK.