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RebelLabs, a technical content and community site for Java developers sponsored by toolmaker ZeroTurnaround, today announced the findings of its annual Java productivity survey, which shows that development teams are more proficient at diagnosing, fixing and testing performance issues.
The RebelLabs study seeks to identify how performance testing is done by organizations in an effort to better understand the trends, best practices and challenges impacting Java development and enterprise teams. This year’s survey shows that developers are tasked with fixing performance issues, irrespective who finds them; nearly six performance issues are found on average during each application release; and it takes about one working week to diagnose, correct and test performance fixes. The survey also found that dedicated performance teams are twice as likely to find and fix application performance glitches compared to other teams like operations.
Indeed, the study showed that high-performing software organizations were more efficient and proactive than others. These teams are 38 percent faster at diagnosing, fixing and testing performance issues. They are also almost 40 percent more likely to profile on a daily or weekly basis, and are 20 percent less likely to test reactively when issues arise.
“Each year we seek to identify what’s really going on in the trenches of Java development—what tools are being embraced, what hurdles are commonplace, what are cutting-edge organizations doing to optimize productivity and ensure quality software gets to market faster,” Simon Maple, developer advocate at ZeroTurnaround, said in a statement. “This year we took a deep look at performance testing and found that profiling your code frequently will give you a greater chance of achieving a larger performance increase, and using multiple tools will increase your chances of finding and resolving application performance issues.”
Now it its sixth year, the 2015 survey saw record participation from more than 1,500 software developers, architects and managers across all industries, company sizes and regions. The vast majority of respondents are software developers working on Web applications (70 percent), followed by desktop applications (11 percent), then batch (6 percent), mobile (4 percent) and other (9 percent).
According to the survey, the most common cause of performance issues is inefficient application code and slow, as well as too many, database queries.
Moreover, almost half of the teams surveyed said they use multiple tools when testing, and 20 percent shared that they write their own in-house tooling to run performance testing. The bulk of respondents—more than 75 percent—said performance issues directly impact the end-user experience and can lead to poor service levels, customer satisfaction and loss of sales.
Meanwhile, based on the survey data, RebelLabs concluded that teams with the most satisfied end users work in smaller teams with 30 percent fewer members, and they are 36 percent more likely to run performance testing while they code.
In addition, almost half (46 percent) of the respondents said they deliver application releases in a period of one to six months. However, 21 percent said they release their application every two weeks or less while 10 percent said they release every six months or more.
RebelLabs committed to donating $0.50 to Dogs for the Disabled for every completed survey, which equates to $781. However, the organization rounded that up to $1,000.