Java developers are facing serious productivity issues: Staff turnover ...

Perforce Software’s 2025 *Java Developer Productivity* report revealed barriers to Java developer productivity can take on many forms, but the most significant issue hurting their ability to work effectively was insufficient documentation (41%). Lacking robust documentation means devs have to spend more time initially getting to grips with the code, architecture, or tools they are working with, bogging down their ability to actually get to the task at hand. It can also feed into various further friction points when conducting maintenance and debugging, where the developer is not able to understand the previous decisions made during development and thus more time is taken to troubleshoot issues. Communication issues between teams were also a common problem cited by businesses, with 38% of developers reporting it was hurting their productivity. Bad communication can lead to improper implementation or developers misunderstanding the requirements of the project or feature they are working on, forcing them to spend time reworking and remediating mistakes. Other commonly cited barriers to Java developer productivity were mismanaged timelines (32%), long redeploy times (29%), developer turnover (26%), and insufficient developer tools (24%). … “About 40% of software developer time is toil not related to writing code – whether it’s waiting for builds to complete, being on call to troubleshoot, and resolving security issues,” he explained. “A lot of the perceived productivity problems developers face stem from process inefficiencies, bottlenecks during testing and quality control, and a lack of automation across the software delivery lifecycle (SLDC).” … The most popular method to boost developer productivity was using AI tools, cited by 50% of respondents, with code completion (60%) and refactoring (39%) being the top use cases highlighted by devs.