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

Abstract

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.

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

“…Extensive studies performed by Amabile and Kramer support the observation and showed that the single best motivator at work is to empower knowledge workers to make progress, which also increases their happiness [30]. Similarly, recent work suggested that many developers want to gain back control over how they spend their time at work, since work is often very randomized and fragmented by interruptions and meetings [50], [81]. The remainder of this section discusses how self-reflection and various tool support might help developers retain control over their work, make more progress and increase productivity.…”

“…A related area of research looked into characteristics and work habits of successful developers, some of which developers might consider relevant and important to pursue as goals. Amongst other characteristics, successful developers often share similar attributes, such as striving for productivity and efficiency, being self-aware, asking for and offering help and feedback, constantly learning and self-improving, doing data-driven decisions, and setting challenging goals [1], [2], [14], [35], [49], [50]. Successful developers also manage to find a good balance between focused work and helping or mentoring others [2], [14].…”

“…The importance of finding a good balance between coding and other work was recently shown to increase developers' job satisfaction [50].…”

The Daily Life of Software Engineers During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…To test whether software developers' activities have changed during the pandemic, we first compared the time participants reported to have spent on each of the 15 activities with those reported by Meyer et al [16] (first research question). The results are displayed in Figure 1, as well as Tables III and IV.…”

Time Estimation Bias in Knowledge Work: Tasks With Fewer Time Constraints Are More Error-Prone

“…Observational studies have found that daily planning is an ongoing challenge for knowledge workers such as academics [7] and software developers [9]. Academics, for instance, need to predict how long different tasks will take to complete in order to meet multiple deadlines [7].…”