Coding is only the tool, i don't spent much time coding, i spent a lot of time designing/analyzing then i spent time debugging/testing which takes more time than coding.
Ask HN: Do you spend more time coding or debugging?
21–30 of 77 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you spend more time coding or debugging?
#22Analysis Programming Debugging Overhead ------------ -------- ----------- --------- -------- My Own Stuff 30% 60% 10% 0% Others' Code 50% 10% 30% 10% Enterprise 10% 10% 10% 70%
I get your point but my guess is the lack of analysis is only exacerbating the problem on the Enterprise end.
That's where you schedule a meeting to talk about scheduling a meeting to talk about Where We Went Wrong With Analysis.
Re: Ask HN: Do you spend more time coding or debugging?
#23I am currently integrating a handful of open source big data systems and frameworks, the breakdown of my time is
60% debugging
15% stack overflow
25% email archives
15% commit logs
10% navigating code, spelunking
12% jira
5% writing tests to confirm config/state/feature availability
3% codingRe: Ask HN: Do you spend more time coding or debugging?
#24I spend most of my time debugging or extending old code, but then again I'm personally responsible for about 600,000 lines of undocumented code without any tests (but there are a lot of daily reports which act as monitoring checks). I will say that I rarely need to debug my own code, it's usually old code that needs to be updated due to a data change or business logic change
Re: Ask HN: Do you spend more time coding or debugging?
#25Analysis Programming Debugging Overhead ------------ -------- ----------- --------- -------- My Own Stuff 30% 60% 10% 0% Others' Code 50% 10% 30% 10% Enterprise 10% 10% 10% 70%
I get your point but my guess is the lack of analysis is only exacerbating the problem on the Enterprise end.
If he means reading code and documentation as the only activities of analysis, then I'd say the ratios are about right.
The overhead consists of endless meetings that never reach consensus, but arguably this could be filed under analysis
Re: Ask HN: Do you spend more time coding or debugging?
#26From The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks:
"""
1/3 planning
1/6 coding
1/4 component test and early system test
1/4 system test, all components in hand.
This differs from conventional scheduling
in several important ways:
2. The half of the schedule devoted to debugging of completed code is much larger than normal.
3. The part that is easy to estimate, i.e., coding, is given only one-sixth of the schedule.
"""Re: Ask HN: Do you spend more time coding or debugging?
#27Neither, I spend more time writing or thinking about tests. When I was earlier in my career I used to insert debug comments, run code, look at output to figure out what was going on. Now, I try to write my tests that will eliminate the need to debug. If I'm trying to fix a bug, the first thing I do is write tests for what should happen if the tests don't already exist and work backwards from there. If you get in a good habit of this, it just becomes natural and with today's toolchains you can re-run tests with a watcher to achieve a real time feedback loop, which is better than a debugger IMO. The plus side is going forward you always know that the code works vs just seeing it work that one time. As your application grows, something may change what the value of the debug statement output and you'll never catch it, but your test will. /old man rant
Re: Ask HN: Do you spend more time coding or debugging?
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get your point but my guess is the lack of analysis is only exacerbating the problem on the Enterprise end.
That's where you schedule a meeting to talk about scheduling a meeting to talk about Where We Went Wrong With Analysis.
You joke but the meeting meetings are pretty common, and as awful as you would expect.
Re: Ask HN: Do you spend more time coding or debugging?
#29From The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks: """ No parts of the schedule are so thoroughly affected by sequential constraints as component debugging and system test. Furthermore, the time required depends on the number and subtlety of the errors encountered. Theoretically this number should be zero. Because of optimism, we usually expect the number of bugs to be smaller than it turns out to be. Therefore testing is u…
and from Robert L Glass, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering (2003, but I think a self-reference from Building Quality Software, 1992):
"The data on the percentage of time spent in error removal has varied over the years, but the usual figures are 20-20-20-40. That is, 20 percent for requirements, 20 percent for design, 20 percent for coding (intuition suggests to most programmers that here is where the time is spent, but intuition is very wrong), and 40 percent for error removal."
Re: Ask HN: Do you spend more time coding or debugging?
#30Neither. I spend most of my time procrastinating and/or day dreaming.