Many PCs we have on the development team are out-dated and are very slow to run Visual Studio 2008. They should very much be replaced with newer machines. But there’s a general reluctance on management/company to buy new machines.
How do we come up with numbers and benchmarks to show that these slow PCs are causing a loss in productivity?
Obviously we can’t call them to sit down with us as we build solutions and/or open various files.
Is there an objective way to come up with some kind of reliable numbers that non-technical people can understand?
It’d be nice to have a way to measure this across an entire organization on many different PCs running Visual Studio. I’m looking for an answer that does better than using a physical stopwatch. 🙂
Modify your solutions so that the pre-build and post-build events write the current time to a centralised database. Include the machine name and the name of the project.
You can then display this information as graph showing time for build vs machine.
This should show a correlation between the build time and the age of the machine, hopefully showing the the older machines are slower. You could even convert the time into a $ (or £ or € ) value to show how much these older machines are costing. Summing this over time will give a value for the payback on any investment in new machines.
By modifying the solutions you can get this logging deployed onto all development machines by simply getting everyone to do a “get latest” from source control.