A recent survey conducted in March by a company named Electric Cloud released their findings on how software engineers, programmers and developers spend most of their time.
The company surveyed around 443 software developers and they found out that programmers spend majority of their time not writing code. On general average, programmers just spend under half the hours in their week on “design and coding.” Most of the time spent by programmers was on a combination of non-programming tasks, such as brainstorming, administrative tasks, environment management and testing.
Based upon the results the of their survey, design and coding take up more hours than any other single process in software development project but those side tasks when added together will take up more time in the entire process.
Here’s the wrap up of the survey results:
***Design and Coding = 19.1 hours per week
***Brainstorming & Collaboration = 6.7 hours
***Administrative tasks = 5.8 hours
***Waiting for Test to Complete = 3.7 hours
***Waiting for Builds to Complete = 3.7 hours
***Environment Management = 2.7 hours
All of the non-design and non-coding tasks take up 22.4 hours per week out of 41.5 hours worked in total.
The survey results concluded that the most of the time spent by most programmers were not on the coding and design aspects. Although there are days where programmers spend more time on coding but as human as they were they also needed some time to enjoy themselves in different task other than coding and designing.
The one sure thing about being a developer was that our day-to-day activities could vary greatly. Generally, the time we spent doing depended on where we were in the development cycle of whatever it is we were building.