Digital Nudges for Encouraging Developer Actions

Abstract

Researchers have examined a wide variety of practices to help software engineers complete different programming tasks. Despite the fact that studies show software engineering practices and tools created to improve the software development process are useful for preventing bugs, decreasing debugging costs, reducing debugging time, and providing additional benefits, software engineers rarely use them in practice. To persuade humans to alter and adopt new behaviors, psychologists have studied the concept of nudges. My research aims to investigate how digital nudges, or the process of using technology to automatically create nudges, can be beneficial in helping software developers and teams adopt software engineering activities and integrate them into their normal workflow.