Fact · Dictation in your apps
58percent
In a field study of professional developers, developers spent about 58 percent of their time on program comprehension activities.
Checked against its source on October 17, 2026
In the source's own words
“developers spend ∼58% of their time on program comprehension activities”
Measuring Program Comprehension: A Large-Scale Field Study with Professionals, Xin Xia et al., IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2018, Abstract.
Open the original- What it measures
- The authors recorded developers' activity across many applications, not only the IDE, and classified it into navigation, editing, comprehension and other activities.
- What it does not show
- The figure is the share of time on comprehension, not the share spent typing. It does not measure how much code the developers wrote.