Where Does The Time Go?

When you start a project, don't you marvel at how efficient you are? How much you can get done in so little time? Why can't we always be that efficient? There are a number of reasons why efficiency drops off. Producing documentation (oh, you want someone else to help you, or you want someone else to use your project?), meetings (you need to work with these other people?), and bug fixes are the primary detractors from producing new functionality.

I've said before that Line of Code count is a horrible metric for measuring software development. It's like measuring hammer strokes in building a house, or the number of licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. So I will be using percentage of time as a virtual metric. What percentage of time is spent in which task is a much more useful estimation than counting the number of nails used in a wall.

When you start a project, obviously most of your time is spent building new features. There may be some note-taking along the way to help you remember what you're doing, but really you're just trying to produce something that works, to solve your original problem. As you move along, there will be a equilibrium between new code, bug fixes, documentation, and meetings. You will wind up with a graph that looks like this:

Good amount of new growth, reasonable amount of bugs being fixed, not too much other stuff. Enough documentation to be useful, but not so much as to be a mountain. A few meetings to discuss what's going on and how it's going.

Compare to these two horror cases:













or













Given that there are only 24 hours in a day (please don't let my boss find that out...), for every additional chunk of time taken doing something else, that's time that can't be spent building software. So how do we maximize the time spent building software, and find the sustainable balance between too much documentation and too little? That's a topic for another day.