What Improves Developer Productivity at Google? Code Quality
Understanding what affects software developer productivity can help organizations choose wise investments in their technical and social environment. But the research literature either focuses on what correlates with developer productivity in ecologically valid settings or focuses on what causes developer productivity in highly constrained settings. In this paper, we bridge the gap by studying software developers at Google through two analyses. In the first analysis, we use panel data with 39 productivity factors, finding that code quality, technical debt, infrastructure tools and support, team communication, goals and priorities, and organizational change and process are all causally linked to self-reported developer productivity. In the second analysis, we use a lagged panel analysis to strengthen our causal claims. We find that increases in perceived code quality tend to be followed by increased perceived developer productivity, but not vice versa, providing the strongest evidence to date that code quality affects individual developer productivity.
Mon 14 NovDisplayed time zone: Beijing, Chongqing, Hong Kong, Urumqi change
11:00 - 12:30 | Empirical IResearch Papers / Industry Paper at SRC LT 51 Chair(s): Lingxiao Jiang Singapore Management University | ||
11:00 15mTalk | What Improves Developer Productivity at Google? Code Quality Industry Paper Lan Cheng Google, Emerson Murphy-Hill Google, Mark Canning Google, Ciera Jaspan Google, Collin Green Google, Andrea Knight Google, Nan Zhang Google, Liz Kammer Google DOI | ||
11:15 15mTalk | Understanding Why We Cannot Model How Long a Code Review Will Take: An Industrial Case Study Industry Paper DOI | ||
11:30 15mTalk | Are We Building on the Rock? On the Importance of Data Preprocessing for Code Summarization Research Papers Lin Shi ISCAS, Fangwen Mu Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiao Chen Institute of Software at Chinese Academy of Sciences, Song Wang York University, Junjie Wang Institute of Software at Chinese Academy of Sciences; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ye Yang Stevens Institute of Technology, Ge Li Peking University, Xin Xia Huawei, Qing Wang Institute of Software at Chinese Academy of Sciences; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences DOI Pre-print | ||
11:45 15mTalk | Leveraging Test Plan Quality to Improve Code Review Efficacy Industry Paper Lawrence Chen Meta, Rui Abreu Meta Platforms, Tobi Akomolede Meta Platforms, Peter Rigby Concordia University; Meta, Satish Chandra Meta Platforms, Nachiappan Nagappan Facebook DOI |