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I've been thinking about software estimation lately, and I have a bunch of questions around time spent coding. I'm curious to hear from people who have had at least a couple years of experience developing software.
When you have to estimate the amount of time you'll spend working on something, how many hours of the day do you spend coding? What occupies the other non-coding hours?
Do you find you spend more or less hours than your teammates coding? Do you feel like you're getting more or less work done than they are?
What are your work conditions like? Private office, shared office, team room? Coding alone or as a pair? How has your working condition changed the amount of time you spend coding each day? If you can work from home, does that help or hurt your productivity?
What development methodology do you use? Waterfall? Agile? Has changing from one methodology to another had an impact on your coding hours per day?
Most importantly: Are you happy with your productivity? If not, what single change would you make that would have the most impact on it?
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If I had to guess, though, the average is probably somewhere in the vicinity of 60%. The biggest influence for me in time spent coding is the presence or absence of meetings.
How many hours do computer programmers work per week? Typically, computer programmers work an average of 40 hours per week, which comes to eight hours per day, Monday through Friday. They usually work between the hours of 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m or comparable work schedules that are typical to office culture.
Sixty percent of people said their workday was the average 7-8 hours. Surprisingly, 40% answered with 9 hours or more. That means that developers only spend about 25% of their workday coding. The main point of my survey was to prove that developers spend their time doing other things besides coding.
I'm a corporate developer, the kind Joel Spolsky called "depressed" in a couple of the StackOverflow podcasts. Because my company is not a software company it has little business reason to implement many of the measures software experts recommend companies engage for developer productivity.
We don't get private offices and dual 30 inch monitors. Our source control system is Microsoft Visual Source Safe. Enough said. On the other hand, I get to do a lot of things that fill out my day and add some variety to my job. I get involved in business analysis, project management, development, production support, international implementations, training support, team planning, and process improvement.
I'd say I get 85% of my day to code, when I can focus and I have a major programming task. But more often I get about 50% of my day for coding. If production support (non coding-related) is heavy I may only get 15% of my day to code.
Most of the companies I've worked for were not actively engaged in evaluating agile processes or test-driven development, but they didn't do a good job of waterfall either; most of their developers worked like cut-and-paste cowboys with impugnity.
On occasion I do work from home and with kids, it's horrible. I'm more productive at work.
My productivity is good, but could be better if the interruption factor and cost of mental context switching was removed. Production support and project management overhead both create those types of interruptions. But both are necessary parts of the job, so I don't think I can get rid of them. What I would like to consider is a restructuring of the team so that people on projects could focus on projects while the others could block the interruptions by being dedicated to support. And then swapping when the project is over.
Unfortunately, no one wants to do support, so the other productivity improvement measure I'd wish for would be one of the following:
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Realistically, it probably averages out to 4 or 5 hours a day. Although its "lumpy" - there may be days where there could be 8 or 9 hours of it.
Of all the software developers I know, the ones that write production code (as opposed to research) 4 to 5 seems to be the max of actual coding. There is a lot of other stuff that goes on.
And to be honest there is a lot of procrastination. I find its a bit like writers block. sometimes its just hard to get started, but then a good 2 hour session is a LOT of work done. Its just all the preparation you have to go through, the experimentation to make sure you are taking the right approach. The endless amount of staring out the window and checking email etc...
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