The 2015 BugHerder Survey Results

First of all, thank you everyone who filled in our survey. We had more than 150 responses which gives us an excellent snapshot of how you use Bugherd for bug and issue tracking and where our product / market fit sits. Thanks again for taking the time out of your day to help out.

If you’re specifically interested in results as a Developer, or if you’re a Product Manager this will be of keen interest to you as we’ve drilled down into some interesting insights for these roles. Onto the results:

What is your job role?

Bugherd user job role

It’s pretty clear that the majority of Bugherd users fall either under the Developer (Dev) or Product Manager (PM) category with more than 57% of all respondents fitting into these roles. The “other” respondents were mainly folks who perform all or many of these roles plus editors, UX and Content managers.

Interestingly more than 18% of Bugherd users were Owners, CEOs and Founders pointing to a trend of users in small teams or one person companies.

Of the people you use BugHerd with, who gets the most benefit?

Benefits of using Bugherd

Overwhelmingly Dev (50% for Back and Front-end) and PM (24%) get the most benefit out of using Bugherd. Since we know that Bugherd is primarily used within the QA portion of a project this benefit breakdown comes as little surprise.

Benefit to Developer and Project Manager using Bugherd

Diving deeper into the data we looked at the answers based on whether the user is a PM or a Dev. Interestingly both user types agreed that Front-End Devs receive the most benefit from using Bugherd. However, PMs are far more likely to get benefit from using Bugherd than the Dev users perceived.

What are the primary benefit/s you receive from BugHerd?

Primary benefit of using Bugherd

Consistent feedback throughout the survey directly touched on the efficiencies Bugherd provides with commentary such as, “It avoids receiving feedback emails, spreadsheets, and word docs.”

When broken down into PM and Dev users the results still had Visual Tracking as the number one benefit when using Bugherd. Surprisingly, the results between the two user groups were almost exactly the same, with communication for PMs being the only standout difference between the two.

What feature/s do you find most useful?

Bugherd features

The first multiple choice answer of our survey conveyed how important our bug pinning tool is to our users. Automatic screenshots, bug pins directly on a website and point and click bug reporting all relate to the reporting tool.

Bugherd features for developer and project manager

With the data broken down to PM and Dev user groups it was interesting to find out which particular features PMs thought useful, considering communication being highly important to them based on the previous question answers. Rather than our assumption that “real-time discussions” would feature highly, it appears that PMs value the task-management and overall functionality of the board as the most useful.

Unsurprisingly Devs value automatic screenshots and 3rd party integrations more than PMs, yet both audiences find pinning a bug directly on a website to be the highest value that Bugherd offers.

Are there any features on your BugHerd wish list?

Bugherd feature wish list

Wow. You really took the time to write some detailed wish lists, thank you so much for the exceptional info!

There are some great ideas for how we can enhance your Bugherd experience. As you can see a large number of you stated that you love Bugherd as is, but the desire for customisable boards and columns, guest management, comment management and mobile functionality were a common thread amongst your feedback.

Since this was an open field question, we couldn’t include every single item on the wish lists the items represented above came up multiple times. However, this doesn’t mean that we don’t take each and every suggestion (such as video capture and bulk editing/closing of tasks) and consider it carefully.

Check out what happened when we sorted the data by PM and Dev!

bugherd feature wish list devs and pms

Finally, we see the differences between the user groups and how they would like to use the product. This graph shows that PMs have concerns regarding guest and client management and more project management related features. Devs are more concerned with overall reporting functionality of the app. There was also mention of speed and performance issues within Bugherd from the Dev users which we will look closely into.

If you use 3rd party integrations, which product/s do you use?

Bugherd integrations

This was another open-ended question that was worded potentially too ambiguously as “If you use 3rd party integrations, which product/s do you integrate with?” Whilst most of the answers were “none” or “I didn’t know you had integrations available, potentially this question was mistaken as “Which 3rd party integrations would you like us to integrate with?” Since Slack is such a popular answer in the bunch (yep it is a great tool and we use it ourselves!).

There was a common thread that users who have integrated via Jira have found it too be cumbersome and moved to Basecamp or Pivotal Tracker but are still looking for an optimum solution.

If you could no longer use BugHerd, what alternative would you choose?

Alternative to Bugherd

Another open ended response, this question gave us excellent insight into your expectations of Bugherd and where you see our fit within the market.

Alternatives that only came up once are represented in the “other” category but include names such as Fogbugz and Invision. It’s worth noting that many responses that included the Jira category were given with a caveat such as “Oh man, don’t scare me! That’s not nice! I don’t wanna go back to creating bugs as Jira tasks!!” or “Had used Jira, but would prefer not to go back to it.” We hear you loud and clear.

Project Manager Bugherd

Interestingly the a large section of the PM responses weren’t sure what to use if Bugherd were no longer available. With answers like “This would be a sad, sad day. I don’t even know. I would cry, a lot.”, “At this point, i would change career. No way I’m going back to word and screenshots” and last but not least … “suicide” we know we have to look after these passionate users.

Do you use BugHerd with external clients?

Bug tracking with clients

Overall, the split between users utilising Bugherd with clients is 70% yes and 30% no. When we looked into the data based on PM and Dev responses the results were similiar. 74% of PMs answered yes to the marginally lower 69% of Devs.

How disappointed would you be if you could no longer use BugHerd?

Alternative to Bugherd

With less than 6% of respondents not at all being disappointed if Bugherd disappeared we’re pretty chuffed with this response.

Bugherd developer bug tracking Bugherd Project Manager Bug tracking

When split between Devs and PMs a staggering 93% of PMs and 92% of Devs being Moderately to Extremely disappointed if they could do longer use Bugherd. The fact that 50% of PMs would be extremely disappointed if they could no longer use Bugherd is pretty stellar!

In a few words how would you describe BugHerd?

Easy bug tracking tool

Easy. So many users said how easy Bugherd is to use. Which is great to hear. One answer summed up Bugherd with the sentence “A screenshot with a pin is worth 100 meetings and conference calls.” Thank you, that’s hit the nail on the head with the value we’re trying to deliver.

It wasn’t all peaches and cream though, thank you for the feedback regarding the loading speed and lack of certain project management features within the task-board to make it a more robust and customisable solution. This is the kind of solution what we’re looking to deliver extremely soon.

If you’ve made it this far we want to say thanks again for taking the survey, if you have any questions regarding the data then you can email marketing@macropod.com and we’ll be able to fill you in even further!

Happy Bugherding.

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