An examination of software engineering work practices

Singer, Janice; Lethbridge, Timothy C.; Vinson, Norman G.; Anquetil, Nicolas

doi:10.1145/1925805.1925815

Cited by 175 publications

(153 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Using a combination of surveys, interviews, observations, and collecting tool usage statistics, Singer and colleagues found that software developers spend most of their time searching for information as well as reading documentation and source code [3]. Most empirical studies since then have focused on various specific aspects of software development, such as the collaboration and communication of developers [23], the typical activities and tools related to coding [22], as well as developers information needs [11] and comprehension of software [24].…”

Section: Developers' Work Practicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A software developer's work day might be influenced by a wide variety of factors such as the tasks being performed, meetings, interruptions from co-workers, the infrastructure or the office environment (e.g., [1], [2], [3]). Some of these factors result in activity and context switches that can cause fragmented work and that can have a negative impact on the developer's perceived productivity, progress on tasks, and quality of output (e.g., [4], [5]).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Using both a diary and an observational study format to understand software developer work practices, Perry and colleagues gained several insights, including that most time was spent coding, and that there was a substantial amount of unplanned interaction with colleagues [2]. Singer and colleagues, using several study methods including tool usage statistics, found that developers spent most of their time reading documentation and that search tools were the most heavily used [3]. Since the time these earlier studies on developers' work practices were conducted, empirical studies of software development have focused more on particular aspects of a developer's work day.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

The Work Life of Developers: Activities, Switches and Perceived Productivity

Meyer

Barton

Murphy

et al. 2017

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

123

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Many software development organizations strive to enhance the productivity of their developers. All too often, efforts aimed at improving developer productivity are undertaken without knowledge about how developers spend their time at work and how it influences their own perception of productivity. To fill in this gap, we deployed a monitoring application at 20 computers of professional software developers from four companies for an average of 11 full workdays in situ. Corroborating earlier findings, we found that developers spend their time on a wide variety of activities and switch regularly between them, resulting in highly fragmented work. Our findings extend beyond existing research in that we correlate developers' work habits with perceived productivity and also show productivity is a personal matter. Although productivity is personal, developers can be roughly grouped into morning, low-at-lunch and afternoon people. A stepwise linear regression per participant revealed that more user input is most often associated with a positive, and emails, planned meetings and work unrelated websites with a negative perception of productivity. We discuss opportunities of our findings, the potential to predict high and low productivity and suggest design approaches to create better tool support for planning developers' workdays and improving their personal productivity. Abstract-Many software development organizations strive to enhance the productivity of their developers. All too often, efforts aimed at improving developer productivity are undertaken without knowledge about how developers spend their time at work and how it influences their own perception of productivity. To fill in this gap, we deployed a monitoring application at 20 computers of professional software developers from four companies for an average of 11 full workdays in situ. Corroborating earlier findings, we found that developers spend their time on a wide variety of activities and switch regularly between them, resulting in highly fragmented work. Our findings extend beyond existing research in that we correlate developers' work habits with perceived productivity and also show productivity is a personal matter. Although productivity is personal, developers can be roughly grouped into morning, low-at-lunch and afternoon people. A stepwise linear regression per participant revealed that more user input is most often associated with a positive, and emails, planned meetings and work unrelated websites with a negative perception of productivity. We discuss opportunities of our findings, the potential to predict high and low productivity and suggest design approaches to create better tool support for planning developers' workdays and improving their personal productivity.

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Section: Developers' Work Practicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The Work Life of Developers: Activities, Switches and Perceived Productivity

Meyer

Barton

Murphy

et al. 2017

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

123

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Search and information seeking behavior of software developers has been studied quite extensively in the past (Sillito et al 2006;Ko et al 2006Ko et al , 2007Singer et al 1997;Murphy et al 2006;Sim et al 1998). However, there have been very few studies on search behavior of developers in Internet-Scale code search engines.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Searching for source code constitutes a significant part of a software development activity (Singer et al 1997;Murphy et al 2006). Software developers use a variety of tools to search source code that range from conventional tools such as 'grep' to advanced search facilities in integrated development environments.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analyzing and mining a code search engine usage log

Bajracharya

Lopes

2010

Empir Software Eng

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This paper presents an analysis of a year long usage log of Koders, the first commercially available Internet-Scale code search engine (http://www.koders.com). The usage log comprises about ten million activities from more than three million users. Analysis of the usage data shows that despite of attracting a large number of visitors, Koders has a very sparse usage and that it lacks regular usage from many of its users. When compared to Web search, search behavior in Koders showed many similar patterns. A topic modeling analysis of the usage data shows what topics users of Koders are looking for. Observations on the prevalence of these topics among the users, and observations on how search and download activities vary across topics, lead to the conclusion that users who find code search engines usable are those who already know to a high level of specificity what to look for. This paper also presents a general categorization of these topics that provides insights on the different ways code search engine users express their queries. It identifies various forms of queries in Koders's log and the kinds of results addressed by the queries. It also provides several suggestions for improvements in code search engines based on the analysis of usage, topics, and query forms. The work presented in this paper is the first of its kind that reveals several insights on the usage of an Internet-Scale code search engine.

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References

2012

Case Study Research in Software Engineering

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An examination of software engineering work practices

Cited by 175 publications

References 12 publications

The Work Life of Developers: Activities, Switches and Perceived Productivity

The Work Life of Developers: Activities, Switches and Perceived Productivity

Analyzing and mining a code search engine usage log

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