Enabling Good Work Habits in Software Developers through Reflective Goal-Setting

Abstract

Software developers are generally interested in developing better habits to increase their workplace productivity and well-being, but have difficulties identifying concrete goals and actionable strategies to do so. In several areas of life, such as the physical activity and health domain, self-reflection has been shown to be successful at increasing people's awareness about a problematic behavior, motivating them to define a self-improvement goal, and fostering goal-achievement. We therefore designed a reflective goalsetting study to learn more about developers' goals and strategies to improve or maintain good habits at work. In our study, 52 professional software developers self-reflected about their work on a daily basis during two to three weeks, which resulted in a rich set of work habit goals and actionable strategies that developers pursue at work. We also found that purposeful, continuous self-reflection not only increases developers' awareness about productive and unproductive work habits (84.5%), but also leads to positive self-improvements that increase developer productivity and well-being (79.6%). We discuss how tools could support developers with a better trade-off between the cost and value of workplace self-reflection and increase long-term engagement.Abstract-Software developers are generally interested in developing better habits to increase their workplace productivity and well-being, but have difficulties identifying concrete goals and actionable strategies to do so. In several areas of life, such as the physical activity and health domain, self-reflection has been shown to be successful at increasing people's awareness about a problematic behavior, motivating them to define a self-improvement goal, and fostering goal-achievement. We therefore designed a reflective goal-setting study to learn more about developers' goals and strategies to improve or maintain good habits at work. In our study, 52 professional software developers self-reflected about their work on a daily basis during two to three weeks, which resulted in a rich set of work habit goals and actionable strategies that developers pursue at work. We also found that purposeful, continuous self-reflection not only increases developers' awareness about productive and unproductive work habits (84.5%), but also leads to positive self-improvements that increase developer productivity and well-being (79.6%). We discuss how tools could support developers with a better trade-off between the cost and value of workplace self-reflection and increase long-term engagement.

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“…An adaptive learning process can lead to the discovery of unforeseen problems and accelerate problem resolution towards learner's objectives. Continual re-evaluation and iteration of the goals [68] could serve as invaluable feedback of the learning progress (Fig. 1 Stage 3).…”

How Gamification Affects Software Developers: Cautionary Evidence from a Natural Experiment on GitHub

“…Regarding the field of software development in particular, future work should engage with the literature on engineer productivity to design effective gamification [73]. For instance, the lessons of recent work on goal-setting methods to foster good habits among software developers could be applied to this question [74].…”

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