Build Tools Users Lose a Month for Turnaround of Incremental Builds: Survey

According to a survey by ZeroTurnaround , a supplier of productivity tools, Java developers using build tools are losing an average of 3.8 weeks per year due to waiting for the turnaround associated with incremental builds.

 

The survey was conducted on more than 600 developers from various Integrated Development Environments and other build tools, including Eclipse, IntelliJ, Ant, NetBeans and Maven. The results show the blocks of time lost in software development to turnaround. This lost time costs developers and software vendors thousands of dollars in lost productivity each year.

 

The questions in the survey included, what build tool is used for incremental builds on ones largest current project, how long does an incremental build take, how often do Java developers run incremental builds, time spent on incremental builds during an hour of coding, time spent on incremental builds, per hour, by build tool, and incremental build length breakdown per build tool.

 

"The good news is a large percentage of developers -- 44 percent -- take less than a half-minute to run incremental builds," ZeroTurnaround CEO David Booth said. "But that still leaves 56 percent who are taking much longer - sometimes as long as five minutes or more. On average, the turnaround is taking two minutes for every incremental build and based on the responses these developers are averaging four to five incremental builds per hour."

 

Booth also said that that eight minutes or nine minutes an hour may not seem like much, but they add up and over the course of a year amount to nearly a month's worth of work time, 152 hours spent waiting.

 

"This is time developers could have been using to add new features, improve code quality, or work on other projects," Booth said. "Based on the survey, Eclipse is used by 33 percent of respondents -- by far our largest single block -- and it is definitely the fastest IDE with a total turnaround of 2.9 minutes an hour, which corresponds to about 5 percent of total development time. Eclipse is the only IDE supporting true incremental build-on-save using a fast embedded compiler, so these results are expected. Meanwhile, Ant and Maven are responsible for more than half of the incremental builds, but they take significantly more time than IDE builds -- about eight minutes per hour compared to less than three for Eclipse."