research-article

Software developers' perceptions of productivity

Authors:

André N. Meyer,

Gail C. Murphy, and

Thomas ZimmermannAuthors Info & Claims

FSE 2014: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering

November 2014

Pages 19 - 29

https://doi.org/10.1145/2635868.2635892

Published: 11 November 2014 Publication History

Abstract

The better the software development community becomes at creating software, the more software the world seems to demand. Although there is a large body of research about measuring and investigating productivity from an organizational point of view, there is a paucity of research about how software developers, those at the front-line of software construction, think about, assess and try to improve their productivity. To investigate software developers' perceptions of software development productivity, we conducted two studies: a survey with 379 professional software developers to help elicit themes and an observational study with 11 professional software developers to investigate emergent themes in more detail. In both studies, we found that developers perceive their days as productive when they complete many or big tasks without significant interruptions or context switches. Yet, the observational data we collected shows our participants performed significant task and activity switching while still feeling productive. We analyze such apparent contradictions in our findings and use the analysis to propose ways to better support software developers in a retrospection and improvement of their productivity through the development of new tools and the sharing of best practices.

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Cited By

Murazvu GParkinson SKhan SLiu NAllen G(2024)A Survey on Factors Preventing the Adoption of Automated Software Testing: A Principal Component Analysis ApproachSoftware10.3390/software30100013:1(1-27)Online publication date: 2-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/software3010001
Weber TBrandmaier MSchmidt AMayer S(2024)Significant Productivity Gains through Programming with Large Language ModelsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36611458:EICS(1-29)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3661145
Russo DHanel PVan Berkel N(2024)Understanding Developers Well-Being and Productivity: A 2-year Longitudinal Analysis during the COVID-19 PandemicACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/363824433:3(1-44)Online publication date: 15-Mar-2024
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Index Terms

Software developers' perceptions of productivity
1. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques
    1. Metrics
2. Information systems
  1. Information systems applications

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cover image ACM Conferences

FSE 2014: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering

November 2014

856 pages

ISBN:9781450330565

DOI:10.1145/2635868

General Chair:
Shing-Chi Cheung
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China
,
Program Chairs:
Alessandro Orso
Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
,
Margaret-Anne Storey
University of Victoria, Canada

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 11 November 2014

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SIGSOFT/FSE'14: 22nd ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

November 16 - 21, 2014

Hong Kong, China

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Overall Acceptance Rate 17 of 128 submissions, 13%

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https://doi.org/10.3390/software3010001
Weber TBrandmaier MSchmidt AMayer S(2024)Significant Productivity Gains through Programming with Large Language ModelsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36611458:EICS(1-29)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3661145
Russo DHanel PVan Berkel N(2024)Understanding Developers Well-Being and Productivity: A 2-year Longitudinal Analysis during the COVID-19 PandemicACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/363824433:3(1-44)Online publication date: 15-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3638244
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