Development Turnaround Time

Fact of life: in most development environments there’s a latency involved in the development stages of building and restarting. You can argue that interpreted, dynamic and highly untyped environments don’t suffer of this problem, but the sad truth is that .NET and J2EE environments are prone to this menace.

Some people call it turnaround time. It takes developing very expensive time, and introduces an extra payload: it ruins any change of maintaining the developer concentration and focus on the task they are working on.

Now that I’m entering the J2EE world I’m realizing that on these side of the world this problem is by far heavier. Let me give you an example on our project:

Average time to graceful stop:	0m 30s
Average time to build and deploy:	1m 30s
Average time to start:	4m 30s
Total turnaround time:	6m 30s

I was a little bit worried about this times until I' found that this times are considered acceptable on the J2EE world! Here are the results from a 1100 developer’s survey:

 

 

 

Oops…

Now the good news is that there may be a solution to cut this times by 8-18%: ZeroTurnAround. I haven’t tried it yet but it looks fantastic. Anyone out there is using this tool?

Please note that this survey was issued by the company that made this tool, so let’s hope that the data is not somewhat biased… One thing is for sure: we have a problem here. At least on our project.