A recent IDC report has revealed an interesting trend: developers are spending more time on operational and background tasks than on actual coding. The findings, detailed in the report titled How Do Software Developers Spend Their Time?, indicate that only 16% of developers’ time in 2024 is spent on application development, a slight increase from 15% the previous year. This suggests that while coding remains a core activity for developers, other critical tasks are taking up a significant portion of their time. These include operational duties such as application performance monitoring, infrastructure management, and security, among others.
The report, authored by Adam Resnick, IDC’s research manager for modern software, highlighted that developers are spending a substantial amount of their time on operational tasks, particularly in areas like implementing continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) processes, as well as managing application and infrastructure performance. Among these, the most notable shift between 2023 and 2024 was the increase in time spent on security-related tasks. Security responsibilities rose from 8% to 13%, reflecting the growing importance of safeguarding applications in an increasingly digital landscape.
Interestingly, while developers are bogged down with operational tasks, the rise of generative AI and agentic AI tools presents a potential solution to alleviate some of this burden. These tools, designed to boost developer productivity, could help reduce the time spent on activities like documentation, testing, and deployment. In addition to streamlining these tasks, they also offer the possibility of accelerating the actual coding process, allowing developers to focus more on writing code and less on the peripheral activities that currently dominate their workday.
The IDC report gathered these insights based on developers’ responses to a survey question asking them to estimate the percentage of their time spent on various activities throughout a typical month. The results provide a detailed breakdown of developers’ time allocation in 2024: application development (16%), writing requirements and test cases (14%), security (13%), implementing CI/CD (12%), monitoring application performance (12%), deploying code (12%), infrastructure monitoring (11%), and user experience (10%). These findings offer a snapshot of the modern developer’s workload, underscoring the need for tools and practices that can help reduce the time spent on non-coding tasks.