The Effect of Noise on Sofware Engineers' Performance

TL;DR

This study investigates how noise impacts software engineers' performance, finding that noise significantly impairs fault fixing but not requirement comprehension, highlighting the need for quieter work environments.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that noise affects fault fixing tasks in software engineering, an area previously underexplored in research.

Findings

Noise significantly worsens fault fixing performance.

No significant effect of noise on requirement comprehension.

Fault fixing tasks are more sensitive to noise.

Abstract

Background: Noise, defined as an unwanted sound, is one of the commonest factors that could affect people's performance in their daily work activities. The software engineering research community has marginally investigated the effects of noise on software engineers' performance. Aims: We studied if noise affects software engineers' performance in (i) comprehending functional requirements and (ii) fixing faults in the source code. Method: We conducted two experiments with final-year undergraduate students in Computer Science. In the first experiment, we asked 55 students to comprehend functional requirements exposing them or not to noise, while in the second experiment 42 students were asked to fix faults in Java code. Results: The participants in the second experiment, when exposed to noise, had significantly worse performance in fixing faults in the source code. On the other hand, we did not observe any statistically significant difference in the first experiment. Conclusions: Fixing faults in source code seems to be more vulnerable to noise than comprehending functional requirements.