Based on research from Enterprise Strategy Group, now part of Omdia, application developers spend only 35% of their time, a little more than two and a half out of eight work hours every day, on productive coding.1 This means that the remaining five and a half hours go to overhead tasks such building, testing, deploying, and troubleshooting code for different on-premises and cloud infrastructure; defining, provisioning, monitoring, and optimizing cloud-specific infrastructure- and platform resources; using AI to personalize experiences; and making everything work in heterogeneous application environments.
Reclaiming these less-productive hours has become a critical factor for business success, as productive coding enables organizations to deliver more customer value faster, and at higher quality, without hiring more developers. At the same time, freeing developers from tedious overhead tasks increases job satisfaction and motivation to deliver the best possible products to their clients.
To address these challenges, innovative solutions like Dynatrace Live Debugging are emerging as key enablers of developer productivity. By providing real-time insights into application performance without disrupting the live system, such tools can significantly reduce the time spent on troubleshooting and debugging, enabling developers to focus more on coding and delivering value.
Observability can directly enhance developer productivity by providing a clear understanding of how applications are used in real life, how these usage patterns affect infrastructure and business, and how code changes impact application health and performance in complex hybrid environments. Ideally, developers can observe in real time how each line of code interacts with the rest of the application stack to proactively address any performance, reliability, and user experience issues.
However, organizations often struggle to convince developers to use observability platforms because they are perceived as complex and infrastructure-centric and are poorly integrated with current workflows. Dynatrace Live Debugging addresses these challenges by offering an intuitive and code-centric approach to observability, enabling developers to debug live systems without disrupting them.
1. Source: Enterprise Strategy Group Research Report, Application Modernization and the Role of Platform Engineering, October 2024.