Small, responsive and dedicated performance teams tend to be the ones that produce the highest-performing Java code, according to a study released today by RebelLabs.
The study, which polled more than 1,500 Java developers around the world, revealed a number of trends around development and performance including the fact that proactive testing and small team sizes tend to correlate with reports of happier end users.
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According to the survey, teams that have happy users are more than 40% more likely than others to profile their code on a daily or weekly basis. By contrast, many developers typically don't take a deeper look into their code unless there's something wrong, the study found more than 42% of respondents said they only performed profiling when there were issues already apparent, and almost 10% said they never profiled at all.
Using multiple tools to search for bugs in Java code, unsurprisingly, tends to catch more of them, according to the survey, and equally unsurprising was the finding that smaller, simpler applications tended to be higher-performing and less buggy than more complicated ones.
Nevertheless, the maxim "test early and often" was demonstrated time and again in the survey, with more aggressive testing regimens consistently correlating to fewer bugs, better user satisfaction, and higher-performing code.
"It's largely accepted that testing as early as you possibly can will result in fixing issues faster and cheaper than when they were found later," the report said. "This mentality should apply both to functional testing as well as performance testing."
Researcher RebelLabs is sponsored by ZeroTurnaround, a software company best known for its JRebel product, a Java IDE plugin that helps simplify the implementation of code changes.