Rethinking Productivity in Software Engineering

by Caitlin Sadowski

Automated methods for aggregating awareness information are likely to produce quantitative over qualitative information since aggregating numbers (e.g., the number of issues per developer) is much easier than aggregating textual information (e.g., what kinds of issues a developer is working on). Unsurprisingly, measures such as lines of code and number of issues open/closed are available in most development tools, but many developers in our study found them too limited to be used as awareness information and worried that such simple numbers may act as a proxy of their productivity. In short, awareness can influence developers’ perceptions of the productivity of their colleagues—and these perceptions are often not accurate if based on the awareness information that tools commonly provide.

This is changing now with LLMs but effectiveness is a concern.