Empirical Study on the Relationship Between Developer's Working Habits and Efficiency

Abstract

Software developers can have a reputation for frequently working long and irregular hours which are widely considered to inhibit mental capacity and negatively affect work quality. This paper analyzes the working habits of software developers and the effects these habits have on efciency based on a large amount of data extracted from the actions of developers in the IDE (Integrated Development Environment), Visual Studio. We use events that recorded the times at which all developer actions were performed along with the numbers of successful and failed build and test events. Due to the high level of detail of the events provided by KaVE project's tool, we were able to analyze the data in a way that previous studies have not been able to. We structure our study along three dimensions: (1) days of the week, (2) time of the day, and (3) continuous work. Our findings will help software developers and team leaders to appropriately allocate working times and to maximise work quality.