Multitasking Across Industry Projects: A Replication Study

TL;DR

This study replicates prior research on multitasking in industry software development, finding that brief context switches do not harm productivity, but larger interruptions negatively impact developers' focus and perceived progress.

Contribution

It applies existing models to industry data, compares industry and open-source developers, and explores developers' perceptions of multitasking through interviews.

Findings

Industry developers multitask as much as OSS developers.

Working more repetitively correlates with higher productivity.

Longer context switches over three minutes negatively affect focus.

Abstract

Background: Multitasking is usual in software development. It is the ability to stop working on a task, switch to another, and return eventually to the first one, as needed or as scheduled. Multitasking, however, comes at a cognitive cost: frequent context-switches can lead to distraction, sub-standard work, and even greater stress. Aims: This paper reports a replication experiment where we gathered data on a group of developers from a software development company from industry on a large collection of projects stored in GitLab repositories. Method: We reused the developed models and methods from the original study for measuring the rate and breadth of a developers' context-switching behavior, and we study how context-switching affects their productivity. We applied semi-structured interviews, replacing the original survey, to some of the developers to understand the reasons for and perceptions of multitasking. Results: We found out that industry developers multitask as much as OSS developers focusing more (on fewer projects), and working more repetitively from one day to the next is associated with higher productivity, but there is no effect for higher multitasking. Some commons reasons make them multitask: dependencies, personal interests, and social relationships. Conclusions: Short context change, less than three minutes, did not impact results from industry developers; however, more than that, it brings a feeling of left the previous tasks behind. So, it is proportional to how much context is switched: as bigger the context and bigger the interruption, it is worst to come back.