Paper Info
Title
The sky is not the limit: multitasking across GitHub projects.
Abstract
Software development has always inherently required multitasking: developers switch between coding, reviewing, testing, designing, and meeting with colleagues. The advent of software ecosystems like GitHub has enabled something new: the ability to easily switch between projects. Developers also have social incentives to contribute to many projects; prolific contributors gain social recognition and (eventually) economic rewards. Multitasking, however, comes at a cognitive cost: frequent context-switches can lead to distraction, sub-standard work, and even greater stress. In this paper, we gather ecosystem-level data on a group of programmers working on a large collection of projects. We develop models and methods for measuring the rate and breadth of a developers' context-switching behavior, and we study how context-switching affects their productivity. We also survey developers to understand the reasons for and perceptions of multitasking. We find that the most common reason for multitasking is interrelationships and dependencies between projects. Notably, we find that the rate of switching and breadth (number of projects) of a developer's work matter. Developers who work on many projects have higher productivity if they focus on few projects per day. Developers that switch projects too much during the course of a day have lower productivity as they work on more projects overall. Despite these findings, developers perceptions of the benefits of multitasking are varied.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1145/2884781.2884875
ICSE
Keywords
Field
DocType
Multitasking, GitHub, productivity
Distraction,Systems engineering,Incentive,Computer science,Coding (social sciences),Software,Human multitasking,Perception,Software development
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
0270-5257
978-1-4503-3900-1
17
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.63
37
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Bogdan Vasilescu193548.75
Kelly Blincoe242621.60
Qi Xuan318726.85
Casey Casalnuovo4743.96
Daniela Damian52144119.80
Premkumar Devanbu64956357.68
Vladimir Filkov7150375.32