Exploring software developers' work practices: Task differences, participation, engagement, and speed of task resolution

TL;DR

This study investigates how software developers work across various tasks, revealing that defect fixing dominates, engagement varies by task type, and external factors influence resolution speed, offering a comprehensive view of development processes.

Contribution

It extends prior research by analyzing a broad range of software tasks beyond defect fixing, highlighting factors affecting developer engagement and task resolution speed.

Findings

Developers mainly focus on defect fixing.

Engagement varies with task type.

External factors influence resolution speed.

Abstract

In seeking to understand the processes enacted during software development, an increasing number of studies have mined software repositories. In particular, studies have endeavored to show how teams resolve software defects. Although much of this work has been useful, we contend that large-scale examinations across the range of activities that are commonly performed, beyond defect-related issues alone, would help us to more fully understand the reasons why defects occur as well as their consequences. More generally, these explorations would reveal how team processes occur during all software development efforts. We thus extend such studies by investigating how software practitioners work while undertaking the range of software tasks that are typically performed. Multiple forms of analyses of a longitudinal case study reveal that software practitioners were mostly involved in fixing defects, and that their engagement covaried depending on the nature of the work they were performing. Furthermore, multiple external factors affected speed of task resolution. Our outcomes suggest that behavioral and intrinsic issues may interact with extrinsic factors becoming significant predictors of the speed of software task resolution.