Developers are wasting their time

Filed under: Development — lars @ 07:50:06 pm

This week I stumbled upon this survey about j2ee containers, where 700 respondants answered questions about the speed with which their chosen container can redeploy/restart after they make a code update during development.  Some interesting numbers came out of this:

  • Application redeploy/restarts frequently take between a few seconds to 5+ minutes, depending ofcourse on the specific application and container.
  • Developers commonly perform a redeploy/restart 2 - 10+ times PER HOUR of coding.
  • Therefore, a significant chunk of a developers time can be spent waiting for redeploys to happen so that they can test out their changes.
  • At 4 minutes, IBM WebSphere takes the longest of surveyed containers to redploy, which is also reflected in the low number of redeploys these developers perform each hour.  Based on these figures, the total time spent waiting for redeploys by a WebSphere developer was calculated to be around 18 minutes per coding hour and 249 hours a year (based on 4 hours a day of coding, 40 weeks a year).

Now, let's keep in mind that the people who ran this survey put in a big plug for JavaRebel at the end as the solution to this problem.  And also that, in practice, these numbers are going to vary wildly from project to project.  That said, I think the above still forms the basis for a very strong argument for the adoption of some agile practices like Test Driven Development.  Furthermore, in circumstances like many of the projects I've worked on where there's no choice but to develop on WebSphere, the above costs on a developer's time can be mitigated by providing the fastest hardware possible!

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