Need for Sleep: the Impact of a Night of Sleep Deprivation on Novice Developers' Performance

TL;DR

This study investigates how a single night of sleep deprivation significantly impairs novice developers' coding quality, engagement, and ability to apply test-first development, highlighting the importance of sleep for software performance.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on the negative effects of sleep deprivation on novice developers' performance and application of agile practices in software engineering.

Findings

50% reduction in code quality due to sleep deprivation

Decreased engagement in coding activities among sleep-deprived developers

Increased fixes for syntactic mistakes in sleep-deprived group

Abstract

We present a quasi-experiment to investigate whether, and to what extent, sleep deprivation impacts the performance of novice software developers using the agile practice of test-first development (TFD). We recruited 45 undergraduates and asked them to tackle a programming task. Among the participants, 23 agreed to stay awake the night before carrying out the task, while 22 slept usually. We analyzed the quality (i.e., the functional correctness) of the implementations delivered by the participants in both groups, their engagement in writing source code (i.e., the amount of activities performed in the IDE while tackling the programming task) and ability to apply TFD (i.e., the extent to which a participant can use this practice). By comparing the two groups of participants, we found that a single night of sleep deprivation leads to a reduction of 50% in the quality of the implementations. There is important evidence that the developers' engagement and their prowess to apply TFD are negatively impacted. Our results also show that sleep-deprived developers make more fixes to syntactic mistakes in the source code. We conclude that sleep deprivation has possibly disruptive effects on software development activities. The results open opportunities for improving developers' performance by integrating the study of sleep with other psycho-physiological factors in which the software engineering research community has recently taken an interest in.