Return on Investment (ROI) using the TotalView Debugger

It has been estimated that the typical software programmer spends 60% to 80% of his or her time debugging. With the average, fully loaded cost of this typical programmer generally in the $110,000 to $140,000 range, the importance - from a cost control perspective - of an engineer having a reliable and full featured software debugger cannot be overstated.

With the advent of multi and many core systems and the need to develop multithreaded, multi-process software that runs on hybrid systems, the challenge of finding and fixing bugs is simply going to increase. The fact is that debugging multithreaded applications is one of the more difficult aspects of developing parallel code.

The TotalView Debugger is the industry standard source code debugger for multithreaded programs. Designed from the start, over 20 years ago, to work in distributed environments on multithreaded and multi-process programs, the TotalView Debugger allows the programmer full control over a single thread or a group of threads.With the TotalView Debugger a programmer can stop, step, and breakpoint one or more threads as he or she deems appropriate in trying to track down a difficult bug.

Tracking down multithreaded bugs has been estimated to account for 30% of the overall time a programmer developing multithreaded applications spends debugging. Using this information and the feedback from our customers who consistently report a 10% to 40% decrease in time spent debugging as a result of using the TotalView Debugger, we have constructed an ROI calculator that will allow you to approximate the cost savings that could be expected in using the TotalView Debugger to debug your multithreaded application.