Reducing Interruptions at Work with FlowLight

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

Barr

Bird

et al. 2021

What is a good workday for a software developer? What is a typical workday? We seek to answer these two questions to learn how to make good days typical. Concretely, answering these questions will help to optimize development processes and select tools that increase job satisfaction and productivity. Our work adds to a large body of research on how software developers spend their time. We report the results from 5971 responses of professional developers at Microsoft, who reflected about what made their workdays good and typical, and self-reported about how they spent their time on various activities at work. We developed conceptual frameworks to help define and characterize developer workdays from two new perspectives: good and typical. Our analysis confirms some findings in previous work, including the fact that developers actually spend little time on development and developers' aversion for meetings and interruptions. It also discovered new findings, such as that only 1.7% of survey responses mentioned emails as a reason for a bad workday, and that meetings and interruptions are only unproductive during development phases; during phases of planning, specification and release, they are common and constructive. One key finding is the importance of agency, developers' control over their workday and whether it goes as planned or is disrupted by external factors. We present actionable recommendations for researchers and managers to prioritize process and tool improvements that make good workdays typical. For instance, in light of our finding on the importance of agency, we recommend that, where possible, managers empower developers to choose their tools and tasks.

Section: Agency: Manage Competition For Attention and Timementioning

confidence: 99%

Today Was a Good Day: The Daily Life of Software Developers

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

Barr

Bird

et al. 2021

“…Visualizing the current productivity and focus to co-workers could prevent interruptions at inopportune moments, where resuming the interrupted task might be more costly than at a moment of low focus. To streamline inopportune interruptions at work, Züger et al suggested to visualize the current focus to the team by using a "traffic light like lamp" [73]. As the envisioned additions and extensions to WorkAnalytics might increase an individual's productivity, they might negatively affect the overall team productivity or the collaboration within teams.…”

Section: Team-awarenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design Recommendations for Self-Monitoring in the Workplace

Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact.

Murphy

Zimmermann

et al. 2017

Self Cite

One way to improve the productivity of knowledge workers is to increase their self-awareness about productivity at work through self-monitoring. Yet, little is known about expectations of, the experience with, and the impact of self-monitoring in the workplace. To address this gap, we studied software developers, as one community of knowledge workers. We used an iterative, user-feedbackdriven development approach (N=20) and a survey (N=413) to infer design elements for workplace self-monitoring, which we then implemented as a technology probe called WorkAnalytics. We field-tested these design elements during a three-week study with software development professionals (N=43). Based on the results of the field study, we present design recommendations for self-monitoring in the workplace, such as using experience sampling to increase the awareness about work and to create richer insights, the need for a large variety of different metrics to retrospect about work, and that actionable insights, enriched with benchmarking data from co-workers, are likely needed to foster productive behavior change and improve collaboration at work. Our work can serve as a starting point for researchers and practitioners to build self-monitoring tools for the workplace.

“…Reducing task switching at times of high focus could greatly reduce multi-tasking, a major source of stress and quality issues [2], [67], [68], [69]. Similarly, an automated task switch detection could improve interruptibility classifiers and postpone in-person interruptions from co-workers to task switch borders, times they are less costly [70], [71], [72]. Another application of automated task detection could be to support the resumption of suspended or interrupted tasks.…”

Section: Applications For Automated Task Detectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Detecting Developers’ Task Switches and Types

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

Satterfield

Züger

et al. 2022

Self Cite

Developers work on a broad variety of tasks during their workdays and constantly switch between them. While these task switches can be beneficial, they can also incur a high cognitive burden on developers, since they have to continuously remember and rebuild the task context-the artifacts and applications relevant to the task. Researchers have therefore proposed to capture task context more explicitly and use it to provide better task support, such as task switch reduction or task resumption support. Yet, these approaches generally require the developer to manually identify task switches. Automatic approaches for predicting task switches have so far been limited in their accuracy, scope, evaluation, and the time discrepancy between predicted and actual task switches. In our work, we examine the use of automatically collected computer interaction data for detecting developers' task switches as well as task types. In two field studies-a 4h observational study and a multi-day study with experience sampling-we collected data from a total of 25 professional developers. Our study results show that we are able to use temporal and semantic features from developers' computer interaction data to detect task switches and types in the field with high accuracy of 84% and 61% respectively, and within a short time window of less than 1.6 minutes on average from the actual task switch. We discuss our findings and their practical value for a wide range of applications in real work settings.