Screencast: Fostering Software Developers’ Productivity at Work

Screencast of my talk that I recently gave at Tasktop. I talked about how we aim to improve developer productivity by increasing their awareness about their work, interruptions, habits and goals.

Click here to access the full blogpost by Patrick Anderson from Tasktop.

Find out more about this work:

• • Characterizing Software Developers by Perceptions of Productivity
  • FlowLight: How a Traffic Light Reduces Interruptions at Work (CHI’17)
  • “The Work Life of Developers: Activities, Switches and Perceived Productivity” accepted at TSE’17
  • Our paper “Software Developers’ Perceptions of Productivity” got nominated for the distinguished paper award at FSE’14!

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Sensing Interruptibility in the Office: A Field Study on the Use of Biometric and Computer Interaction Sensors

Knowledge workers experience many interruptions during their work day. Especially when they happen at inopportune moments, interruptions can incur high costs, cause time loss and frustration. Knowing a person’s interruptibility allows optimizing the timing of interruptions and minimize disruption. Recent advances in technology provide the opportunity to collect a wide variety of data on knowledge workers to predict interruptibility. While prior work predominantly examined interruptibility based on a single data type and in short lab studies, we conducted a two-week field study with 13 professional software developers to investigate a variety of computer interaction, heart-, sleep-, and physical activity-related data. Our analysis shows that computer interaction data is more accurate in predicting interruptibility at the computer than biometric data (74.8% vs. 68.3% accuracy), and that combining both yields the best results (75.7% accuracy). We discuss our findings and their practical applicability also in light of collected qualitative data.

You may access the pre-print here.