stepTime vs. totalTime in VUMAT

Hi

I’m trying to develop a VUMat routine so I’ve already
started to learn its features. I recently got this problem that what exactly
the variable stepTime means! I created a model with 3 steps including the initial
step and I coded my routine somehow that when the stepTime is equal to 0 it
prints something into a file. Surprisingly only once in whole analysis the
stepTime would be 0 and that’s exactly at the beginning of the analysis when
totalTime is in fact 0. Could anyone please explain why this happens?

Thanks