& Continuous Learning

I convinced a partner to upgrade the computers we were using for software development. Maybe this article will help you convince your manager to do the same!

Old Computers

When I started at the partner, we were using standard issued corporate Dell laptops. Specifically, we had Dell Latitude E6520 laptops. According to a review on NotebookCheck.net (2011), these laptops were sold for around $1,700. The specs were as follows:

Operating System	Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit
CPU	Intel i5 2.5 GHz
RAM	8 GB
HDD	Encrypted 5400 rpm
Video	Intel HD 3000 integrated

 Old Performance

The project we were working on was a large java web application consisting of 18 applications that were made up of 53 modules which had over 2,700 classes. This includes both production and test classes. With these laptops we observed fairly poor performance while doing typical software developer tasks:

Task	Duration (seconds)
Start Intellij IDEA	213
Start Eclipse	750
vagrant services up (ubuntu server precise 64)	114
vagrant services provision	952
build local database	216
maven clean install	1450
start Tomcat server in eclipse	680
Clean tomcat work directory in eclipse	780
Open iReport Professional	159

 New Computers

I convinced the management to purchase new computers for a few of us to see what the performance improvement would be. We went with Dell Precision T3600 workstations. According to the Dell website, these workstations cost about $2,500 as configured below.

Operating System	Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit
CPU	Intel Xenon E5 3.6 GHz
RAM	32 GB
HDD	512 GB SSD
Video	AMD FirePro 2270

New Performance

Using these new workstations we observed a significant performance improvement. The duration of the tasks we do frequently improved on average by over 500%:

Task	Duration (seconds)	% Improvement
Start Intellij IDEA	29	634%
Start Eclipse	49	1431%
vagrant services up (ubuntu server precise 64)	45	153%
vagrant services provision	375	154%
build local database	171	26%
maven clean install	887	63%
start Tomcat server in eclipse	112	507%
Clean tomcat work directory in eclipse	54	1344%
Open iReport Professional	42	279%

Cost-Benefit

The tasks we do now take about 3 minutes on average. If this average duration was 200% slower, it would be about 9 minutes on average. That equates to a time savings of about 6 minutes every time we do one of these tasks.

The cost for this improvement was $2,500 - $1,700 = $800. If you assume a developer has a $75,000 salary, it would take just over 21 hours of time saved to earn back the $800 you invested in the new equipment. Since we have determined we save on average about 6 minutes each time we perform a task, we will save the 21 hours if we do a task 210 times. If we assume we do a task at least 5 times per day then we will save the 21 hours in 42 working days, or just over 8 weeks. So in just over two months you can recover your investment.

This calculation assumes that the existing equipment can be used and therefore the original expense is not a loss. It also assumes that the first $1,700 of the workstation is not considered an expense because you had already spent that amount for equipment before. This calculation shows what the return on investment is for upgrading the equipment beyond the default corporate configuration.

The above calculation does not account for ongoing maintenance costs, but I think it is reasonable to assume that those costs will be offset by the ongoing time savings.

I think most managers would approve an $800 expense knowing that it would provide a 500% improvement that would be payed back in just over 2 months.

References

http://www.notebookcheck.net

http://www.dell.com