Rethinking Productivity in Software Engineering

Get the most out of this foundational reference and improve the productivity of your software teams. This open access book collects the wisdom of the 2017 "Dagstuhl" seminar on productivity in software engineering, a meeting of community leaders, who came together with the goal of rethinking traditional definitions and measures of productivity. The results of their work, Rethinking Productivity in Software Engineering, includes chapters covering definitions and core concepts related to productivity, guidelines for measuring productivity in specific contexts, best practices and pitfalls, and theories and open questions on productivity. You'll benefit from the many short chapters, each offering a focused discussion on one aspect of productivity in software engineering. Readers in many fields and industries will benefit from their collected work. Developers wanting to improve their personal productivity, will learn effective strategies for overcoming common issues that interfere with progress. Organizations thinking about building internal programs for measuring productivity of programmers and teams will learn best practices from industry and researchers in measuring productivity. And researchers can leverage the conceptual frameworks and rich body of literature in the book to effectively pursue new research directions. What You'll Learn Review the definitions and dimensions of software productivity See how time management is having the opposite of the intended effect Develop valuable dashboards Understand the impact of sensors on productivity Avoid software development waste Work with human-centered methods to measure productivity Look at the intersection of neuroscience and productivity Manage interruptions and context-switching Who Book Is For Industry developers and those responsible for seminar-style courses that include a segment on software developer productivity. Chapters are written for a generalist audience, without excessive use of technical terminology. ; Collects the wisdom of software engineering thought leaders in a form digestible for any developer Shares hard-won best practices and pitfalls to avoid An up to date look at current practices in software engineering productivit

Rethinking Productivity in Software Engineering

Get the most out of this foundational reference and improve the productivity of your software teams. This open access book collects the wisdom of the 2017 "Dagstuhl" seminar on productivity in software engineering, a meeting of community leaders, who came together with the goal of rethinking traditional definitions and measures of productivity. The results of their work, Rethinking Productivity in Software Engineering, includes chapters covering definitions and core concepts related to productivity, guidelines for measuring productivity in specific contexts, best practices and pitfalls, and theories and open questions on productivity. You'll benefit from the many short chapters, each offering a focused discussion on one aspect of productivity in software engineering. Readers in many fields and industries will benefit from their collected work. Developers wanting to improve their personal productivity, will learn effective strategies for overcoming common issues that interfere with progress. Organizations thinking about building internal programs for measuring productivity of programmers and teams will learn best practices from industry and researchers in measuring productivity. And researchers can leverage the conceptual frameworks and rich body of literature in the book to effectively pursue new research directions. What You'll Learn Review the definitions and dimensions of software productivity See how time management is having the opposite of the intended effect Develop valuable dashboards Understand the impact of sensors on productivity Avoid software development waste Work with human-centered methods to measure productivity Look at the intersection of neuroscience and productivity Manage interruptions and context-switching Who Book Is For Industry developers and those responsible for seminar-style courses that include a segment on software developer productivity. Chapters are written for a generalist audience, without excessive use of technical terminology. ; Collects the wisdom of software engineering thought leaders in a form digestible for any developer Shares hard-won best practices and pitfalls to avoid An up to date look at current practices in software engineering productivit

Digital intrusions or distraction at work and work-Life conflict

Internet usage for non-work activities during work hours is an increasingly common concern among management scholars and practitioners as well as for employees, particularly in relation to its impact on work-life conflict and individual well-being. Drawing on memory for goals theory, this study investigates the distinction between digital intrusions and digital interruptions during work and their concomitant impact on work-life conflict. Using a set-theoretic approach to analyse data gathered from information technology (IT) professionals in Germany and Australia, we explain how a 2 * 2 matrix comprising non-work online messaging, or personal digital communication, during work and intrusion contributes to work-life conflict. A key finding is that employees reported work-life conflict only if they perceived private messaging as a source of intrusion rather than as a distraction. From a practical perspective, this finding suggests that employers may provide employees with micro-breaks to attend to perceived intrusions and thus reduce sources of work-life conflict. Contributions and suggestions for future studies are discussed

Individual differences limit predicting well-being and productivity using software repositories : a longitudinal industrial study

Reports of poor work well-being and fluctuating productivity in software engineering have been reported in both academic and popular sources. Understanding and predicting these issues through repository analysis might help manage software developers' well-being. Our objective is to link data from software repositories, that is commit activity, communication, expressed sentiments, and job events, with measures of well-being obtained with a daily experience sampling questionnaire. To achieve our objective, we studied a single software project team for eight months in the software industry. Additionally, we performed semi-structured interviews to explain our results. The acquired quantitative data are analyzed with generalized linear mixed-effects models with autocorrelation structure. We find that individual variance accounts for most of the R-2 values in models predicting developers' experienced well-being and productivity. In other words, using software repository variables to predict developers' well-being or productivity is challenging due to individual differences. Prediction models developed for each developer individually work better, with fixed effects R-2 value of up to 0.24. The semi-structured interviews give insights into the well-being of software developers and the benefits of chat interaction. Our study suggests that individualized prediction models are needed for well-being and productivity prediction in software development.Peer reviewe

Systems for Managing Work-Related Transitions

Peoples' work lives have become ever-populated with transitions across tasks, devices, and environments. Despite their ubiquitous nature, managing transitions across these three domains has remained a significant challenge. Current systems and interfaces for managing transitions have explored approaches that allow users to track work-related information or automatically capture or infer context, but do little to support user autonomy at its fullest. In this dissertation, we present three studies that support the goal of designing and understanding systems for managing work-related transitions. Our inquiry is motivated by the notion that people lack the ability to continue or discontinue their work at the level they wish to do so. We scope our research to information work settings, and we use our three studies to generate novel insights about how empowering peoples' ability to engage with their work can mitigate the challenges of managing work-related transitions. We first introduce and study Mercury, a system that mitigates programmers' challenges in transitioning across devices and environments by enabling their ability to continue work on-the-go. Mercury orchestrates programmers' work practices by providing them with a series of auto-generated microtasks on their mobile device based on the current state of their source code. Tasks in Mercury are designed so that they can be completed quickly without the need for additional context, making them suitable to address during brief moments of downtime. When users complete microtasks on-the-go, Mercury calculates file changes and integrates them into the user's codebase to support task resumption. We then introduce SwitchBot, a conversational system that mitigates the challenges in discontinuing work during the transition between home and the workplace. SwitchBot's design philosophy is centered on assisting information workers in detaching from and reattaching with their work through brief conversations before the start and end of the workday. By design, SwitchBot's detachment and reattachment dialogues inquire about users' task-related goals or user's emotion-related goals. We evaluated SwitchBot with an emphasis on understanding how the system and its two dialogues uniquely affected information workers' ability to detach from and later reattach with their work. Following our study of Mercury and SwitchBot, we present findings from an interview study with crowdworkers aimed at understanding the work-related transitions they experience in their work practice from the perspective of tools. We characterize the tooling observed in crowdworkers' work practices and identified three types of "fragmentation" that are motivated by tooling in the practice. Our study highlights several distinctions between traditional and contemporary information work settings and lays a foundation for future systems that aid next-generation information workers in managing work-related transitions. We conclude by outlining this dissertation's contributions and future research directions

Evaluating Worker Performance Using the Energy Concept

Over the decades, worker performance on construction projects has been a significant source of concern to be evaluated. Comprehensive studies have developed models for evaluating worker performance outside of the construction industry; however, minimal research has been conducted to evaluate worker performance in the construction industry. One of the reasons for a lack of similar research in construction is because the construction process makes construction more complicated compared to other industries. This research aims to further develop a new way of evaluating worker performance in the construction industry using the energy concept. Within the context of this research, “energy” is a property related to performing construction operations and can be defined as the feeling of stress, pressure, and being overwhelmed as a result of the factors, conditions, and resources that accompany the performance of the task. To develop the energy model, an initial conceptual model from previous research and literature review was used as a starting point. The conceptual model contained three levels (constituents, components, and metrics) to measure the level of energy felt by a worker when performing construction operations. The Delphi method was utilized to identify, verify, and quantify the constituents and components, and confirm the energy model. The results from the literature review and Delphi survey revealed 14 constituents, 53 components, and one metric for each component to measure the level of energy. Constituents, components, and metrics were used to develop the energy model to evaluate worker performance on construction sites during a project and assess an ongoing project. The contributions of this research to knowledge are the validation and identification of the constituents, components, and metrics used for evaluating worker performance using the energy concept. The energy model contributes to evaluating worker performance in the construction industry based on the level of energy felt by the worker

How do interruptions affect productivity?

Work is frequently interrupted. What is known about how interruptions affect productivity? This important question has been studied using a variety of research methods, from controlled experiments designed to learn about the effect of interruptions on task performance, to analytical cognitive models that explain what makes an interruption disruptive, to in-situ observational studies that document the kinds of interruptions people experience in their actual workplaces. In this chapter, we review research on interruptions that has used these three research methods. We review what the methods entail, and what insights it has given on how interruptions affect productivity

How do interruptions affect productivity?

Work is frequently interrupted. What is known about how interruptions affect productivity? This important question has been studied using a variety of research methods, from controlled experiments designed to learn about the effect of interruptions on task performance, to analytical cognitive models that explain what makes an interruption disruptive, to in-situ observational studies that document the kinds of interruptions people experience in their actual workplaces. In this chapter, we review research on interruptions that has used these three research methods. We review what the methods entail, and what insights it has given on how interruptions affect productivity