observing developers’ workdays revealed that they constantly switch contexts, often multiple times an hour. For example, developers switched tasks on average 13 times an hour and spent just about 6 minutes on a task before switching to another one. An example of a task switch is a developer who is switching from implementing a feature to answering e-mails that are unrelated to the previous task. Similarly, when we looked at how much time developers spend on activities–actions they usually pursue at work (e.g., writing code, running tests, or writing an e-mail)–we found out that they usually
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