Like other businesses, developers spend only part of their time with their core process, namely writing code. Productivity suffers from continual interruptions, and time is lost spent solving problems, developing documentation, testing, and producing reports.

The observations above were revealed as part of the 2012 edition of ZeroTurnaround Productivity Report. Developers spend much of their time taking care of their devices and business tasks, solving problems, as well as collaborating and performing administrative duties. ZeroTurnaround, the vendor behind the popular JRebel and LiveRebel JVM plugins, has released its latest “Developer Productivity Report 2013” explaining how engineering tools and practices impact software quality and delivery.

Quality and Predictability

How do the practices, tools and decisions of development teams have an effect on the quality and predictability of software releases? ZeroTurnaround study analyzes the responses of 1,006 software engineers from across the globe. Most respondents said they sometimes release apps with bugs, so users have a 50-50 chance of the app they’re using containing a critical bug. On average, nearly 60 percent of releases go to production critical-bug free, while bottom 10 percent of respondent get apps out the door bug-free.

The report found that if developers are not paying attention to good design, builds, performance tests and polish, chances are there they will lose the understanding of the system and expose to more bugs.

Code quality coverage is often a hot-debated topic among developers. Based on the responses of over 1000 engineers, almost than half of the developers said they don’t even monitor code quality. The impact on predictability of releases is very high, with nearly 10-point increase in predictability comes with fixing all code quality issues. The report found that fixing code quality issues increases software quality by up to 7 percent, and the predictability of releases by up to 9 percent.

Automated Functional Testing

Programmers spend a lot of time on development activities, without the production of code in the strict sense. Automating functional tests are a good way to simpler design, and reduce fewer bugs. On an average, one-third (33 percent) of software functionality is covered by automated tests.

Automated tests showed the largest overall improvements both in the predictability and quality of software deliveries. When relating functional test automation with predictability and quality, it was found that automating tests increases software quality by up to 9 percent and predictability of release by up to 12 percent.

Encourage Developers to Pair Up

More worrying from the point of view of productivity, developers spend more time doing the firefighters to create solutions. But good news is that developers are pairing up to devote to the design, testing and reviews, the planning, architecture strategy. More than 2/3 of respondents’ team up at least sometimes, and there is a significant increase (up to 7 percent) in software quality associated with this.

A solid majority (76%) of respondents review code for at least some commits. Reviewing code has become more or less a standard practice for development teams. Only a tiny sliver of about 2% of teams do multiple code reviews for all commits. In terms of predictability of releases alone, doing code reviews for commits (up to +11 %) is the largest single beneficial practice, along with estimating tasks as a team (+6 %); however, involving the management drops it by -6 percent.

The results further show that daily standups, team group chat online, and weekly meetings all improve predictability, while meeting multiple times a week and having a remote team (teleconferencing) associates with decreased quality.

Tools Use in Development

Which technologies and tool types influence predictability of releases? Nearly half of the developers are still using text editors as the source for writing code. The study found that there is an increase in predictability for users of Code Quality Analysis, Continuous Integration, Issue Tracker, Profiler and IaaS solutions. The top 3 individual tools that enhance predictability are JRebel (+8 %), Jenkins/Bamboo (+4 %) and Confluence (+3%).

The biggest winners are Version Control and IDEs. The domination of Subversion (58%) is being threatened by Git (47%) for de facto leadership of the Version Control space. Mercurial tool is also losing ground to Git as well. Atlassian’s JIRA (57%) is the most used tool followed by GitHub (21%), Redmine (9.3%), Bugzilla (8.8%), BitBucket (8.3%) and Mantis (5.9%).

When it comes to popularity of communication tools, Skype takes the lead (39.3%), followed by Confluence (29.7%), Google Docs (26.9%), Google Hangout (16.7%) and Google+ (7.6%). Users of Confluence show a positive trend in the area of predictability and JRebel shows a statistically significant increase of 8% in predictability of software delivery. In addition, predictability of releases increases when teams use Version Control (+9 %), IDEs (+8 %), and Continuous Integration servers (+5 %).

Finally, the report concludes teams in general should focus on improving various work practices, using the best tools available and continuously improving the nature of their organizational culture. Not only do good tools make developers more productive, but they also serve as focal point on which they can enforce the practices that further improve ability to predictably deliver quality software.