Survey Shows Vast Majority of Developers Losing Three to Seven Weeks per Year to Redeployment

Online, September 22, 2009 (Newswire.com) - ZeroTurnaround, a supplier of productivity tools for Java coders, today released results of a survey conducted during July to September, which reveal that nearly three-fourths of developers are losing two-and-a-half weeks or more per year while waiting for software development containers to redeploy. The survey drew responses from more than 1,100 developers representing a wide range of software containers, from Tomcat to WebLogic and highlights the expansive blocks of time lost in software development to turnaround - the process of waiting to view changes after coding them - which costs developers and software vendors thousands upon thousands of dollars each year.

"When we initiated the survey, we expected to find that developers were redeploying, on average, about five times an hour with each redeploy taking around a minute,'" said ZeroTurnaround CEO David Booth,. "While the five redeploys per hour we originally estimated was borne out by the survey results, we were quite surprised to find that most developers - nearly two-thirds - reported that their redeploys were taking two or more minutes with the average being two-and-a-half minutes."

Booth did note that some respondents provided input that was not trustworthy with some saying they never redeployed and others saying they spent five or more minutes per hour and redeployed a dozen or more times an hour. "That would be more than 60 minutes per hour, which is quite impossible," he noted.

Even after removing such untrustworthy results, Booth said the numbers remained staggering.

"With the oddly skewed numbers removed, the average went from twelve-and-a-half minutes per hour down to ten and a half minutes per hour with a standard deviation of 8, which is more trustworthy," said Booth. "Nevertheless, this still represents nearly 18-percent of total development time, which is considerably more than we expected."

Booth pointed out that spending five minutes per coding hour for each redeploy, even if you factor in that developers do not spend their entire eight-hour work days coding due to meetings and other activities, still costs developers two-and-a-half weeks of waiting time each year. He is quick to point out that the survey showed developers are, on average, spending more than twice that amount of time each hour.

"Ten and a half minutes an hour translates into more than five weeks a year of lost time," said Booth. "For individual coders, this is time they could have been spending adding new features, improving code quality, or working on other projects. For companies with teams of developers, this translates into a lot of money that cuts into their return on investment."

In addition to the data about redeploys and the time they take, ZeroTurnaround's survey also gathered results about developers' preferred containers, which containers require the greatest number of redeploys per hour and how long each container takes for a redeploy. The full results of the survey can be found on the ZeroTurnaround web site at www.zeroturnaround.com/blog/ updated-survey-results-java-ee-containers-heaven-or-hell.

About ZeroTurnaround
Based in Estonia - the same country that introduced Skype, Kazaa, etc - ZeroTurnaround builds productivity tools that provides huge results for development teams and their budgets. It's flagship product, JRebel, is a JAR file that's under 1Mb, is easy to setup and use, saves between 2-8 weeks of wasted development time, and costs under $150/year. As the company moves forward, so does its visions of improving quality, consistency, and deliverability in the software industry. Its next vision vision, now in private beta, can be viewed at http://www.zeroturnaround.com/liverebel/.

For additional information about ZeroTurnaround, please visit www.zeroturnaround.com.

###