Various research suggests that reading, editing, and navigating code encompasses significant cognitive effort beyond simply writing new code. And contrary to popular belief, most coding is maintenance coding, so comprehension is a significant overhead cost in the software development process.
We’ve found a variety of research focused on comprehension. While the details may differ, the significance of the effort in software development doesn’t.
Early Research Foundations
IBM started the Program Understanding Project at IBM's Research Division in 1986. Research by Thomas Corbi in 1989 found that more than half of the effort in accomplishing a task for the programmer is towards understanding the system.
Fjeldstad and Hamlen conducted research on software maintenance tasks and found that a significant portion of time, 47% for enhancement tasks and 62% for correction, is dedicated to understanding the existing code and documentation.
Fast forward a few decades, and the numbers hold steady or even increase:
Modern Research Validation
Fast forward a few decades, and the numbers hold steady or even increase. A research on program development concluded that programmers spent 70% of their time in program comprehension.
Specifically, it has been estimated that reading and understanding code consumes nearly 60% of a software professional’s time.
And we haven’t even addressed the time a developer may spend mentoring new developers, answering questions from business analysts, participating in knowledge-sharing meetings, or engaging in the myriad activities that rely on an understanding of what a company’s code does.
What would your developers do with the time they save by using COBOL Colleague?