Rethinking Productivity in Software Engineering

by Caitlin Sadowski (Editor), Thomas Zimmermann (Editor)

Get the most out of this foundational reference and improve the productivity of your software teams. This open access book collects the wisdom of the 2017 "Dagstuhl" seminar on productivity in software engineering, a meeting of community leaders, who came together with the goal of rethinking traditional definitions and measures of productivity.

The results of their work, Rethinking Productivity in Software Engineering, includes chapters covering definitions and core concepts related to productivity, guidelines for measuring productivity in specific contexts, best practices and pitfalls, and theories and open questions on productivity. You'll benefit from the many short chapters, each offering a focused discussion on one aspect of productivity in software engineering.
Readers in many fields and industries will benefit from their collected work. Developers wanting to improve their personal productivity, will learn effective strategies for overcoming common issues that interfere with progress. Organizations thinking about building internal programs for measuring productivity of programmers and teams will learn best practices from industry and researchers in measuring productivity. And researchers can leverage the conceptual frameworks and rich body of literature in the book to effectively pursue new research directions.
What You'll Learn
Review the definitions and dimensions of software productivity


See how time management is having the opposite of the intended effect


Develop valuable dashboards


Understand the impact of sensors on productivity


Avoid software development waste


Work with human-centered methods to measure productivity


Look at the intersection of neuroscience and productivity


Manage interruptions and context-switching
Who Book Is For
Industry developers and those responsible for seminar-style courses that include a segment on software developer productivity. Chapters are written for a generalist audience, without excessive use of technical terminology.

Genres: Nonfiction, Management, Technology, Software, Leadership

338 pages, Paperback

Published May 8, 2019

Reviews

[Safwat Safi · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of theory, a little can be practiced

[Emil O. W. Kirkegaard · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is not much good literature in software engineering. The stuff that claims be empirical is usually based on tiny studies of students, or large but mostly useless studies of public code repositories. The studies that claim interventions are efficient base that more on author's experiences than rigorous evaluation. In that way, the field is at the stage of science medicine was decades ago. Where are the large randomized trials? Where are the multi-lab studies? Where are the meta-analysis? Publication bias? Open data?

This book had a few interesting things, but mostly it was more of the same. Read it only if you have some particular reason to read new stuff in this field. The best parts are chapter "The Mythical 10x Programmer" (which is good!) and "Fitbit for Developers: Self-Monitoring at Work", some interesting ideas for practice.

[Denis Romanovsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a collection of articles on productivity in software development. Some articles are very good, other are moderate. But what this book does great - it looks at productivity from different angles. And there are not so many book around even trying to do anything similar. So, highly recommended for leads and managers in software development.

[Sooraj · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are in a central role responsible for the productivity of software developers in your organization, then this book is worthwhile.

It is a collection of several articles of research work conducted from the time Software Engineering productivity has been studied. It starts with the definition of productivity, explains the difference between similar concepts e.g. efficiency, differentiates between productivity at individual, team and organizational level and dwells into depth of each, provides frameworks and techniques for measuring productivity, provides a list of factors that influence productivity, explains importance of benchmarking and dashboarding, and finally provides best practices and tools for improving productivity.

The content is rich and you gain a lot of insights. The authors have gone to great effort to collect all the diverse research work on productivity. The language is academic in nature, so certainly not meant for people who are not regular readers.

On one hand we are lucky that this collection of research is available for online reading for free. On the other hand, it's not new work, it's only a collection, it serves a very small niche market segment, and it requires a lot of discipline to finish reading this book.

[Ricardo Hernández · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compendium of short papers which focus us on how to think and approach software engineering productivity from all its angles: social, organizational, behavioral, mechanical, and rational.

Each paper is concise (three to five pages) and opens up the ideas that can be developed into further dialogues. Beyond the classic idea of merely improving metrics for the sake of improving (or gaming the system), this books offers a glimpse on how we can rethink productivity from the perspective of humans, its motivations, rationale, and daily life experiences and all the dimensions/environments in which engineering takes place (physical, virtual, social, individual, and well-being).

[Mikhail Filatov · Rating 3 out of 5]

Сборник статей, из многоголосия которого я сделал следующие выводы:
Как либо статистически значимо доказать эффективность тех или иных методов разработки ПО- pair programming, agile, etc. пока ученым не удалось, как и в целом разработать научную теорию управления "knowledge workers". Любопытно про отвлечения на митинги, звонки и проч. - как показали наблюдения, девелоперы сами отвлекаются в среднем раз в 3-5 минут, что никак не влияет на эффективность их работы.

[Jevgenij · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a collection of pseudo-scientific articles about various aspects of productivity. The articles are very general and fall into one of 3 categories:
1. Obvious things that anyone can figure on their own (measuring code lines is stupid, so measure what is relevant in specific situation).
2. Useless blog-level crap (whole article about a led lamp indicating your status to colleagues).
3. Interesting things that have no examples and no good explanations (COSMIC).

[Khaled Charkie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book serves as a starting point in understanding the basics of software development productivity. The good thing is that it gives resources to several papers that can be used for research or additional reading at the end of each chapter.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written by participants at the Dagstuhl "Rethinking Productivity in Software Engineering" seminar plus other experts. It contains 25 essays exploring productivity in software engineering, discussing what metrics people attempt to use, how these measure or impact productivity, and alternates. There's some crossover, but is generally from varied approaches.

[Hamid · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you work on a productivity team in your organization, it may be worth reading it once.