If you, as an engineering manager, often ponder how to boost your team’s effectiveness, chances are you are overlooking how much time your team spends debugging issues in your app, especially on remote devices.

It’s such a powerful open secret that I’m almost hesitant to write about it publicly.

You see, most development directors, engineering managers, and CTOs know how to boost their app development team’s performance.

1. They invest in Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD):

CI/CD pipelines automate the process of integrating code changes and deploying them to production. Everyone will appreciate how it reduces the time and effort required for manual testing and deployment, leading to more frequent and reliable releases.

2. They foster a DevOps Culture:

DevOps practices bridge the gap between development and operations teams, promoting a culture of collaboration, communication, and shared responsibility. This holistic approach leads to faster problem resolution, improved morale, better deployment cycles, and overall system reliability.

3. They strive to be good leaders:

They lead by example, continue learning, give advice, and even jump into the trenches with the team to tackle a nasty bug. They are supportive and open-minded.

But they typically overlook a method that is guaranteed to cut their product time to market at least in half without doing anything groundbreaking, hiring expensive coaches, or letting team members wear underwear on top of their pants on Fridays to boost morale.

According to a 2020 quantitative study, debugging efforts reportedly cost companies approximately $61 billion annually, translating into 620 million developer hours lost yearly.

On average, software engineers spend about 13 hours fixing a single software failure. That’s a lot of hours not being spent on rolling out releases or building new features.

If you had a way to help your distributed team spend less time figuring stuff out and more time coding and testing, you’d save a ton of time and ship more software faster.

And luckily, there is a way to do it.

Take AppSpector for a spin. It only takes a few minutes to integrate. It doesn’t affect your production version (development only). It’s safe and secure.

AppSpector is designed to fill the gaps left by traditional debugging tools, giving engineering managers the necessary edge, and ultimately becoming a huge win.

AppSpector is compatible with both Android and iOS. With features designed to address the pain points of remote debugging, AppSpector allows distributed development teams to inspect database, network, and log data directly from user devices, regardless of the device’s location.

AppSpector provides advanced features (and a great UI) to debug apps:

Real-time monitoring:

Offers immediate insights into app performance, reducing the time spent replicating issues. There are extensive monitoring options available in AppSpector that allow you to track different activities in real time.

Network inspection:

Allows detailed examination of network requests and responses, streamlining API debugging. HTTP network traffic can be monitored. You can examine any request, seeing the request and response headers and body. AppSpector also provides XML and JSON highlighting with formatting and folding options, making larger responses easier to navigate.

SQL debugging:

Facilitates direct interaction with the app’s database, improving database-related debugging efficiency. For example, SQLite monitoring allows you to track all queries and shows the database schema and data.

You can also issue custom SQL queries on any database and immediately see the results in the browser.

Log monitoring:

Enhances the visibility of app logs in real-time, aiding quicker issue identification. You can access both iOS and Android log information with a user interface that is easier to navigate compared to a typical command line.

Environment checks:

Provides immediate access to app configurations and system details, speeding up environment-related troubleshooting. You can view all environment data in one place, saving you from looking through logs for specific fields or values.

Event tracking:

Helps understand user interactions within the app, assisting in UI/UX debugging. You can also filter certain events. For example, you can hide sensitive data like authentication tokens or skip irrelevant HTTP requests to keep output clean. For more information, see Data filtering.

By adopting AppSpector, your team can avoid the common pitfalls of remote debugging, such as missing crucial log data or being unable to replicate the user’s environment, which leads to pushed deadlines for your critical releases.

Our users report saving up to 38 hours of debugging time per team member each month. That’s huge, wouldn’t you agree?

And the best part – you can take AppSpector for a spin risk-free. We have a 14-day free trial with no credit card or contract obligations whatsoever. Just hit Sign Up and cut your product time to market in half.

Simple as that.