Where's the crash?

How long does it take to identify the cause of a crash?

Think of your current project. Or the last one, if you’re between projects. Now think of the last time it crashed. Adjust to the closest similar thing your particular language/runtime might have to a “crash”. A segmentation fault. A panic. An unhandled exception. You get the idea.

Now: How long did it take you to identify the line of code that caused the crash?

If you knew immediately, becuase the crash report included a meaningful stack trace, then you win!

Or maybe you had to grep your code base for an identfying string in the crash report?

Or did your grep turn up multiple results, that had to be manually investigated to find the true culprit?

Or was it even worse, and your crash report was completely missing, or so inadequate that the only way to find the cause was to manually step through the code, either with your editor, or through a debugger?

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