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[2/3] Enabling the Study of Software Development Behavior With Cross-Tool Logs (Category Management)

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Continue. story About this article, it is necessary to tell about the principles of privacy, methods of validation, an example of research, as well as about the consequences of creating the InSession methodology and where it further appeared. Let’s start with the principles of confidentiality that the authors follow. Data collection from employees only

  • Focus on working tools Refusing to collect content created by employees
  • Encryption of stored data
  • Audited access to data Prohibition of reporting on individual employees without consent (||It is interesting that in practice this principle is very difficult to achieve.||) Destruction of data after a specified storage period (3 year)

To validate the measurements, the authors decided to compare them with behavioral self-reports. n (diaries). The authors conducted a study with 25 Google engineers who created their journals then compared those diaries to session data using the PABAK Consent Index. (Prevalence and Bias Adjusted Kappa). Results showed high agreement for review time (0.81)coding (0.69) research (0.70).

Next, the authors conducted an experiment to assess the effect of readability certification of engineers at the time of review. Readability certification is a certification that the engineer knows the idioms of the language and the rules of writing adopted by Google. The hypothesis was that when the engineer received certification by readability Reviewers will have to spend less time on a review Engineers will have to spend less time on revisions to reviews (shepherding)

When analyzing the impact of the code readability process, they applied linear regression to control the developer’s experience, the number of reviewers and the size of the change, and included a random effect for the author’s identity. And they got these results. For C++, review time has been reduced by 4.5%, shepherding time - on 10.5% For Java, shepherding time is reduced by 10.0%

  • 88Percentage of engineers who complete Java readability agree with positive experience statement

This research has significantly influenced approaches to measuring developer productivity in the industry. InSession became the basis for answering long-term software engineering questions, such as “Do types make development more efficient?” Google’s approach to measuring developer behavior through cross-tool logs has inspired other organizations to build similar systems.

The methodology invented by the authors is mentioned in the following articles, for example:

The end of the analysis with the images from the article will be in the last post.

#Engineering #Software #Bigtech #Productivity #Management #Leadership #Processes