Application monitoring for bug reproduction in web applications: An action research study

Bug reproduction in web applications often fails due to insufficient information in bug reports. Application monitoring (AM) could mitigate this problem by automatically collecting relevant information to support the bug reproduction process. However, there is (a) limited empirical evidence of AM’s effectiveness in real-world organizational contexts, and (b) limited insights about how to introduce AM into existing software development processes. This paper presents a longitudinal Action Research study conducted within Lentune, a mid-sized SaaS provider, to investigate how AM can support bug reproduction in web applications. Over five iterative cycles between July 2024 and October 2025, we implemented comprehensive end-to-end monitoring solutions encompassing client-side interactions, backend API activity, and infrastructure status, and evaluated their impact on Lentune’s bug reproduction processes. Our findings reveal that AM significantly improves bug reproduction efficiency, reducing non-reproducible bugs from 33% of all bugs to 0% and decreasing average bug closure time from 60 days to 15 days. We identified two essential categories of bug reproduction data: bug-specific evidence (data directly related to the bug) and contextual evidence (environmental and system context, including client, backend, and infrastructure layers). The study also uncovers significant socio-technical challenges in implementing monitoring solutions. Our results provide actionable insights for organizations seeking to implement AM for bug reproduction, demonstrating that successful adoption requires not only technical solutions but also structured training, change management, and iterative refinement of related processes and tools.