Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out

Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out I am often asked what I mean when I say that developers spend most of their time figuring the system out. Let’s unpack the statement. The oldest reference on the topic I know of dates back to 1979 in a book by Zelkowitz, Shaw, and Gannon entitled Principles of software engineering and design. It said that most of the development time was spent on maintenance (67%). Software development costs (1979) Granted, the book does not specify how the figure was obtained. Still, it was deemed an important enough problem to attract significant research attention since then. So, how far are we now, more than 4 decades later? Let’s look at a recent paper by Xia, Bao, Lo, Xing, Hassan, & Li entitled Measuring Program Comprehension: A Large-Scale Field Study with Professionals and published in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 44, 951-976, 2018. This paper is quite interesting in that it describes in great details how the figur ... Read full article.