Rethinking Productivity in Software Engineering

by Caitlin Sadowski

While tools that help developers make sense of everything that goes on in a software project are necessary to enable developer awareness, these tools currently favor quantitative information over qualitative information. To accurately represent what goes on in a software project, awareness tools need to focus on summarizing instead of measuring information and be careful when presenting numbers that could be used as an unintended proxy for productivity measures. We argue for the use of natural language and text processing techniques to automatically summarize information from a software project in textual form. Based on the findings of our study, we suggest that such tools should categorize the events in a software project according to whether they are expected or unexpected and use natural language processing to provide meaningful summaries rather than numbers and graphs that are likely to be misinterpreted as productivity measures.