| Yes, we measured it. I am rounding these numbers for simplicity, but essentially, our split of developer time and KLOC follows: # Labor and spend allocation - 75% of engineers were on our server-side (Java) (1) - 25% of engineers were on front-end (JavaScript/HTML/CSS) # KLOC (2) - 14% Java - 54% JavaScript - Everything else is in other (Scala, CSS, HTML, shell scripts, SQL, etc.) From speaking with other companies, we found these ratios are within the normal range. We've seen 60% server-side to 80% server-side, but the directional finding appear to be actionable. As mentioned in Note 1 below, we excluded backend work from server-side work. Also, and this is important, these metrics hold for our single page applications (SPA) projects. I do not have metrics for projects with a more traditional server-side only rendering...but I would guess that these finding do not hold true in such a situation. If anyone else is willing to share their metrics I would be very interested. I'm always open to seeing the bigger picture in case there are some important facts that I have not factored into my decision making process. # Notes (1) This 75% is after segmenting server-side work (i.e. Java application server) from back-end processing (i.e. Kafka, Storm, Hadoop). Obviously, data processing will remain in Java, so we excluded it from our comparison. (2) KLOC is a poor metric, but it was quick and dirty for us and provided good directional information. Also, all developers (front and back end) are good. So we did not need to adjust for quality of code (i.e. good developers have lower KLOC on average). |