Paper Info
Title
Socio-technical work-rate increase associates with changes in work patterns in online projects
Abstract
Software developers work on a variety of tasks ranging from the technical, e.g., writing code, to the social, e.g., participating in issue resolution discussions. The amount of work developers perform per week (their work-rate) also varies and depends on project needs and developer schedules. Prior work has shown that while moderate levels of increased technical work and multitasking lead to higher productivity, beyond a certain threshold, they can lead to lowered performance. Here, we study how increases in the short-term work-rate along both the technical and social dimensions are associated with changes in developers' work patterns, in particular communication sentiment, technical productivity, and social productivity. We surveyed active and prolific developers on GitHub to understand the causes and impacts of increased work-rates. Guided by the responses, we developed regression models to study how communication and committing patterns change with increased work-rates and fit those models to large-scale data gathered from traces left by thousands of GitHub developers. From our survey and models, we find that most developers do experience work-rate-increase-related changes in behavior. Most notably, our models show that there is a sizable effect when developers comment much more than their average: the negative sentiment in their comments increases, suggesting an increased level of stress. Our models also show that committing patterns do not change with increased commenting, and vice versa, suggesting that technical and social activities tend not to be multitasked.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/ICSE.2019.00099
Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Software Engineering
Keywords
Field
DocType
software engineering,work related stress,work patterns,multitasking,socio technical,work rate increase,survey,empirical analysis,regression modeling,GitHub,software developers,open source software,online projects,commits,comments,sentiment,social activities,technical activities,focus switching,recommendations,repositories,issues,pull requests,discussions,teams,collaboration,team members,social coding
Social coding,Systems engineering,Computer science,Regression analysis,Social dimension,Schedule,Sociotechnical system,Human multitasking,Open source software,Marketing,Work rate
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
0270-5257
978-1-7281-0870-4
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.35
29
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Farhana Sarker110.35
Bogdan Vasilescu293548.75
Kelly Blincoe3268.67
Vladimir Filkov4150375.32