(Original creator: adriang)
I found this article online about the productivity of developers which I found quite interesting. Basically developers spend more time on ‘admin’ than on actually writing code. Although the definition of ‘admin’ can be taken in a few ways, including what was in the article, I wasn't shocked by it to be honest. I would estimate that in the Uniface Lab, we would get about a 1/3rd pure code cutting from our developers, but we always have at least 2 open code lines that need to be maintained, meaning that merging and building takes additional effort. (So, for example, right now we have a Uniface 9.6.03 and a Uniface 10.01 code line open). Generally code is only one part of a final delivery, something we have to remind a few of our ‘customer facing colleagues’ quite frequently. Most of our development also goes through a process of peer reviews for things like risk assessment, compatibility with other activities and so on, and generally the developers will also deliver documentation which needs to go through a publication process. Part of the delivery will also include tests which end up in our regression test suite (aka the RT), which has about 25 years worth of tests and checks and is continually growing.
I’d be very interested to know what the developers out there in ‘Uniface land’ estimate their overall ‘coding productivity’ to be when compared to other activities. Thoughts?