What Predicts Software Developers’ Productivity?

Abstract

Organizations have a variety of options to help their software developers become their most productive selves, from modifying office layouts, to investing in better tools, to cleaning up the source code. But which options will have the biggest impact? Drawing from the literature in software engineering and industrial/organizational psychology to identify factors that correlate with productivity, we designed a survey that asked 622 developers across 3 companies about these productivity factors and about self-rated productivity. Our results suggest that the factors that most strongly correlate with self-rated productivity were non-technical factors, such as job enthusiasm, peer support for new ideas, and receiving useful feedback about job performance. Compared to other knowledge workers, our results also suggest that software developers' self-rated productivity is more strongly related to task variety and ability to work remotely.

"How Was Your Weekend?" Software Development Teams Working From Home During COVID-19

“…Since the survey was anonymous and no personal identifiable information was collected (to encourage more candid responses), we were unable to triangulate responses from members of the same team, which would have further improved the validity of the findings. While there are advantages and disadvantages to selecting self-reported measures of productivity versus automated technical ones, our choice aligns similar recent work [7], [12], [28].…”

“…(Team-Q3) The items and response formats for Team-Q2 and Team-Q3 can be found in Tables I and II. The items for Team-Q2 and Team-Q3 were derived from a combination of the WFH-Survey and previous literature [12].…”

“…To quantify and model which factors are associated with a change in team productivity, we included team culture factors as items in the Team-Survey because team culture factors have been established as important factors of productivity [13]. Related work has shown that there are additional team-related factors that can predict productivity including confidence and supportiveness of a team [12]. Therefore, we added a question to the survey with agreement about: (1) my manager is highly capable; (2) my team members are highly capable; (3) my team members are supportive of new ideas; and (4) I feel positively about other people on my team.…”

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

“…job satisfaction, stress level) [44], [45]. On productive days, developers generally manage to make a lot of progress on their tasks, are supported by their co-workers or other peers, and have a minimum amount of context switches [43], [46], [47]. Contrary, some of the biggest impediments to productive work are regular external interruptions, selfdistractions and meetings, since they can make it difficult to focus on and make progress on coding tasks for an extended time (e.g.…”

Individual differences limit predicting well-being and productivity using software repositories: a longitudinal industrial study

“…While software development contains tasks not captured by these metrics, the number of commits and lines of code have been widely used as proxy measures for productivity in software engineering (Mockus et al 2002;Boehm and et al 1981). Recent work has noted lines of code having the highest correlation with self-evaluated productivity (Murphy-Hill et al 2019). Entropy has been used to quantify the complexity of code changes in previous literature (Hassan 2009).…”