Christoph Treude, Fernando Figueira Filho, Uirá Kulesza. Summarizing and Measuring Development Activity. In Proceedings of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering. 2015.
Software developers pursue a wide range of activities as part of their work, and making sense of what they did in a given time frame is far from trivial as evidenced by the large number of awareness and coordination tools that have been developed in recent years. To inform tool design for making sense of the information available about a developer’s activity, we conducted an empirical study with 156 GitHub users to investigate what information they would expect in a summary of development activity, how they would measure development activity, and what factors influence how such activity can be condensed into textual summaries or numbers. We found that unexpected events are as important as expected events in summaries of what a developer did, and that many developers do not believe in measuring development activity. Among the factors that influence summarization and measurement of development activity, we identified development experience and programming languages.