How Much Time Do Developers Spend Actually Writing Code?

The New Stack 3 min read Original

Summary

A June 2019 survey by Tidelift and The New Stack asked nearly 400 professional software developers how they spend their work time. Respondents said they spend only 32% of their time writing new code or improving existing code. The other 35% goes to managing code, which includes maintenance (19%), testing (12%) and security issues (4%). Another 23% goes to meetings and operational tasks.

The split changes by role. Software developers spend 39% of their time writing or improving code and 22% on maintenance. Managers spend twice as much time in meetings as the people they supervise. DevOps engineers and managers spend 34% of their time in meetings and 7% on security issues.

Code maintenance tied to open source dependencies takes about 25% of maintenance time, matching an earlier survey. In organizations with more than 500 developers, that share rises to 32%. The report suggests a managed open source approach could free up developer time.

Chris Grams

Chris is the head of marketing at Tidelift. Chris has more than 20 years of experience building open source technology companies, including a decade each at Red Hat and technology-branding agency New Kind, where he helped build brands such as Ansible, NGINX and Anaconda.

In June of 2019, Tidelift and The New Stack jointly fielded a survey of professional software developers. Almost 400 people responded with thoughts about how they use open source software today, what holds them back, and what tools and strategies would help them use it even more effectively. In particular, with this survey, we were interested in learning how a managed open source strategy might help developers reclaim time, speed up development, and reduce risk.

In this post, we share the third of eight key findings. If you don’t wait to wait for the rest of the results, you can download the full survey report right now at the link below.

Finding #3: Developers spend more time maintaining, testing and securing existing code than they do writing or improving code.

We wanted to use this survey to get a detailed view of how developers spend their time.

We gave respondents six categories in which to bucket their time and asked them to estimate the percentage of their work invested in each category.

How developers spend their time graphic

While this might not be surprising to developers, it is perhaps disheartening to see that respondents spend less than one-third of their time writing new code or improving existing code (32%). Respondents spend 35% of their time managing code, including code maintenance (19%), testing (12%) and responding to security issues (4%). Another 23% is spent in meetings and on management and operational tasks.

Respondents spend 35% of their time managing code, including code maintenance (19%), testing (12%) and responding to security issues (4%).

Breaking the data down by job description gives us an even clearer view. Software developers spend 22% of their time just doing code maintenance. They also spend a higher percentage of their time writing new code or improving existing code (39%) and a much lower percentage of their time on operational tasks and in meetings (14%).

Tidelift developer time graphic

Not surprisingly, people who manage software developers spend twice as much time in meetings as do the people they supervise. DevOps engineers and managers spend even more of their time in meetings (34%), partly because they are facilitating communication between different teams. They also spend twice as much time (7%) responding to security issues, which will be of no surprise to those familiar with the DevSecOps trend.

We also asked respondents to share the percentage of the time they spend on code maintenance related to their open source dependencies. The answer is right on target with the results in a previous survey (25%). But once we look at the data by number of developers in the organization, it presents an even starker picture. In organizations with over 500 developers, the percentage of time devoted to maintenance activities rises to 32%, which might be due to maintenance issues becoming more complex as the codebase and applications get larger.

Maintenance time related to open source

This data makes one thing very clear: there is a huge opportunity for organizations to find new ways to increase the percentage of time their developers spend writing code. What more can be done to make developers more efficient so they can spend less time on activities like code maintenance? When it comes to maintaining open source dependencies, a managed open source approach that offloads these maintenance activities to the project creators could have a big impact on returning some of that precious development time.

Want the full survey results in one report? Get them here now.