The manager then can look at data and think, "Hm, these bugs are costly. What we can use to reduce number of bugs to reduce costs?" Bugs are a waste. Number of

The manager then can look at data and think, "Hm, these bugs are costly. What we can use to reduce number of bugs to reduce costs?" Bugs are a waste. Number of bugs can be reduced with better practices: peer review, various tests; better software: linter, automatic verifier, compile time checkers (-Wall + -Werror, rust), code generators, libraries; or additional business process: quality assurance. To improve something, your manager need to measure it first. You can propose everyday reporting of spent time instead of spying tool, e.g. "2h working on #1234, 6h fixing bug #23456", which is much more valuable to your manager than raw data. In my previous company, we reduced the number of bugs and time to fix by an order of magnitude, because we were able to see the effect of changes in tooling and development process.