Category Archives: developers-productivity

Characterizing Software Developers by Perceptions of Productivity


Studying Developers’ Perceptions of Productivity instead of Measuring it

To overcome the ever-growing demand for software, we need new ways of optimizing the productivity of software developers. Existing work has predominantly focused on top-down approaches for defining or measuring productivity, such as lines of code, function points, or completed tasks over time. While these measurements are valuable to compare certain aspects of productivity, we argue that they miss the many other factors that influence the success and productivity of a software developer, such as the fragmentation of their work, their experience, and so on. A developer who spends the workday with writing a high-quality test-case or helping a co-worker would have a bad productivity-score with said measurements. Hence, in our previous work we looked at productivity from the bottom-up, looking at developers’ individual perceptions of productivity contrary to what was done in previous work. We found that while perceptions of productivity are indeed very individual, they follow certain habitual patterns each day (e.g. Morning-People, Low-At-Lunch People, and Afternoon-People) and there are activities that most developers consider as unproductive or productive.

Similar Perceptions of Productivity

This previous work however, left us questioning if there are possibly more people with similar perceptions of productivity that can be clustered together. To investigate this, we run an online survey with 413 professional software developers who currently work at Microsoft (average experience 9.6 years) and asked them four questions asking them to describe productive (Q1) and unproductive (Q2) workdays, to rate their agreement with statements on factors that might affect productivity (Q3) and to rate the interestingness of productivity measures at work (Q4).

We found out that developers can roughly be clustered into six groups with similar perceptions: the lone, focused, balanced, leading, and goal-oriented developer. This allows us to abstract and simplify the variety of individual perceptions into groups and optimize productivity for these groups instead of individuals. In the following, I will describe the specific characteristics of these groups:

Some just love creative tasks with no clear goal, while others prefer measurable tasks.
  1. The social developers feel productive when helping coworkers, collaborating and doing code reviews. To get things done, they come early to work or work late and try to focus on a single task.
  2. The lone developers avoid disruptions such as noise, email, meetings, and code reviews. They feel most productive when they have little to no social interactions and when they can work on solving problems, fixing bugs or coding features in quiet and without interruptions. To reflect about work, they are mostly interested in knowing the frequency and duration of interruptions they encountered. Note that this group of developers is almost the opposite of the first group (the social developer) in how productive they feel when encountering social interactions.
  3. The focused developers feel most productive when they are working efficiently and concentrated on a single task at a time. They are feeling unproductive when they are wasting time and spend too much time on a task, because they are stuck or working slowly. They are interested in knowing the number of interruptions and focused time.
  4. The balanced developers are less affected by disruptions. They are less likely to come early to work or work late. They are feeling unproductive, when tasks are unclear or irrelevant, they are unfamiliar with a task, or when tasks are causing overhead.
  5. The leading developers are more comfortable with meetings and emails and feel less productive with coding activities than other developers. They feel more productive in the afternoon and when they can write and design things. They do not like broken builds and blocking tasks, preventing them (or the team) from doing productive work.
  6. The goal-oriented developers feel productive when they complete or make progress on tasks. They feel less productive when they multi-task, are goal-less or are stuck. They are more open to meetings and emails compared to the other clusters, in case they help them achieve their goals. In contrast to group 3 (the focused developer), goal-oriented developers care more about actually getting stuff done (i.e. crossing items off the todo-list), while the focused developer cares more about working efficiently.

Optimizing Productivity for Different Groups of Developers

The six clusters and their characteristics provide relevant insights into groups of developers with similar productivity perceptions that can be used to optimize the work and flow on the team and the individual level. The differences between software developers’ preferred collaboration and work styles show that not all developers are alike, and that the cluster an individual or team belongs to could be a basis for tailoring actions for improving their work and productivity.

For example, on the team level, we could provide quiet, less interruption-prone office to the lone and focused developers (cluster 2 and 3), and seat social developers (cluster C1) who feel more comfortable with discussions every now and then. Another example is task assignments, assigning an explorative task for a new product that is very open without clear goal might be less suitable for the goal-oriented developer (cluster 6) as opposed to the social and leading developer (cluster 1 and 5) who prefer explorative tasks that require intensive collaboration.

Not everyone feels productive when spending time in meetings.

On the individual level, developers might benefit from tailored user experiences for their (development) tools. Maybe someday, we can build virtual assistants, e.g. Cortana/Alexa for Developers, that recommend (or automatically take) actions, depending on the developers’ cluster. For example, they could block out notifications from email, Slack, and Skype during coding sessions for the lone developer (cluster 2) but allow them for the social developer (cluster 1). Or they could recommend the focused developer (cluster 3) to come to work early to have uninterrupted work time, or suggest the balanced developer (cluster 4) to take a break to avoid boredom and tiredness. Or they could help with scheduling meetings, depending on the users’ preferences.


In the paper (find a pre-print here) you may find more detailed explanations into the study method, and a much more detailed discussion of the clusters.


Survey on how You Plan your Most Productive Days!

We are currently running a survey to learn more about knowledge workers’ work days – How are they planning them? Are they using any tools? How could tools help with more efficient planning?

We invite you to participate in this short, 10-12 minutes survey. To future goal is to develop improvements for common task management software.

Access the survey here.

We appreciate your help a lot! Please contact us in case you have any questions.

André Meyer –
Jürgen Cito – cito@ifi.uzh.c

seal @ ICSME 2017

We are very happy to announce that our research group got two papers accepted at ICSME 2017 in Shanghai, China.

The first paper is entitled “A Tale of CI Build Failures: an Open Source and a Financial Organization Perspective” and was written in collaboration with ING Nederland, University of Sannio and TU Delft. The authors of the paper are: Carmine Vassallo, Gerald Schermann, Fiorella Zampetti, Daniele Romano, Philipp Leitner, Andy Zaidman, Massimiliano Di Penta and Sebastiano Panichella.

Abstract: Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) are widespread in both industrial and open-source software (OSS) projects. Recent research characterized build failures in CI and identified factors potentially correlated to them. However, most observations and findings of previous work are exclusively based on OSS projects or data from a single industrial organization. This paper provides a first attempt to compare the CI processes and occurrences of build failures in 349 Java OSS projects and 418 projects from a large financial organization, ING Nederland.


Through the analysis of 34,182 failing builds (26% of the total number of observed builds), we derived a taxonomy of failures that affect the observed CI processes. Using cluster analysis, we observed that in some cases OSS and ING projects share similar build failure patterns (e.g., few compilation failures as compared to frequent testing failures), while in other cases completely different patterns emerge. In short, we explain how OSS and ING CI processes exhibit commonalities, yet are substantially different in their design and in the failures they report.


The second accepted paper is entitled “Towards Activity-Aware Tool Support for Change Tasks” and was written by Katja Kevic and Thomas Fritz.

Abstract: To complete a change task, software developers perform a number of activities, such as locating and editing the relevant code. While there is a variety of approaches to support developers for change tasks, these approaches mainly focus on a single activity each. Given the wide variety of activities during a change task, a developer has to keep track of and switch a lot between the different approaches.


By knowing more about a developer’s activities and in particular by knowing when she is working on which activity, we would be able to provide better and more tailored tool support, thereby reducing developer effort. In our research we investigate the characteristics of these activities, whether they can be identified, and whether we can use this additional information to improve developer support for change tasks. We conducted two exploratory studies with a total of 21 software developers collecting data on activities in the lab and field. An empirical analysis of the data shows, amongst other results, that activities comprise a consistently small amount of code elements across all developers and tasks (approx. 8.7 elements). Further analysis of the data shows, that we can automatically detect the boundaries and types of activities, and that the information on activity types can be used to improve the identification of relevant code elements.