A while back I talked about calculating return on investment for developer tools. That post brought in great comments pointing out limitations in a few assumptions made, including:
- Some shops average more than eight hour days or five day weeks.
- Many devs spend only a portion of their day actually writing new code or maintaining existing code.
- Most devs work less than the 50 weeks per year used in the original spreadsheet.
So, I'm back with a revised spreadsheet, one that allows you to more accurately describe your work year, as well as how much time team members actually spend coding per day. The result is a more accurate picture of how much time it takes to achieve ROI. Many of the cells have comments to explain their values.
This spreadsheet also adds a field for Developer Gain, a value in man-months that represents the amount of dev time gained due to the productivity boost. Even for a small 3-dev team with each member spending an average of 5 hours a day writing or maintaining code, Developer Gain for CodeRush and Refactor! Pro still adds up to over five additional developer man-months every year.
Take a look at the spreadsheet and let me know what you think.