Related papers: "I'll Finish It This Week" And Other Lies
Large language models cannot estimate how long their own tasks take. We investigate this limitation through four experiments across 68 tasks and four model families. Pre-task estimates overshoot actual duration by 4--7$\times$ ($p <…
To improve software developers' productivity has been the holy grail of software engineering research. But before we can claim to have improved it, we must first be able to measure productivity. This is far from trivial. In fact, two…
Software developers balance a variety of different tasks in a workweek, yet the allocation of time often differs from what they consider ideal. Identifying and addressing these deviations is crucial for organizations aiming to enhance the…
Code completion has become a common practice for programmers during their daily programming activities. It aims at automatically predicting the next tokens or lines that the programmers tend to use. A good code completion tool can…
AI coding assistants have become prolific in recent years. Through a longitudinal mixed-methods investigation, we examined how professional software engineers perceive the effects of AI coding assistants in regard to task focus, developer…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in accelerating the scientific research pipeline. A key capability for this process is the ability to generate novel research ideas, and prior studies have found settings in which…
Procrastination causes student stress, reduced learning and performance, and results in very busy help sessions immediately before deadlines. A key challenge is encouraging students to complete assignments earlier rather than waiting until…
Everyone spends some time waiting every day. HCI research has developed tools for boosting productivity while waiting. However, little is known about how people naturally spend their waiting time. We conducted an experience sampling study…
A scientist may publish tens or hundreds of papers over a career, but these contributions are not evenly spaced in time. Sixty years of studies on career productivity patterns in a variety of fields suggest an intuitive and universal…
Existed studies have shown that crowd workers are more interested in taking similar tasks in terms of context, field, and required technology, rather than tasks from the same project. Therefore, it is important for task owners to not only…
Instructors and students alike are often focused on the grade in programming assignments as a key measure of how well a student is mastering the material and whether a student is struggling. This can be, however, misleading. Especially when…
We investigate how to efficiently set up work groups to boost group productivity, individual satisfaction, and learning. Therefore, we conduct a natural field experiment in a compulsory undergraduate course and study differences between…
In recent years there has been an increasingly pressing need for the evaluation of results from public sector research activity, particularly to permit the efficient allocation of ever scarcer resources. Many of the studies and evaluation…
A common expectation is that career productivity peaks rather early and then gradually declines with seniority. But whether this holds true is still an open question. Here we investigate the productivity trajectories of almost 8,500…
Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to boost human productivity by speeding up task completion -- provided users know when to offload cognitive work to them. But we do not know if users are well-calibrated in estimating these…
Task switching and interruptions are a daily reality in software development projects: developers switch between Requirements Engineering (RE), coding, testing, daily meetings, and other tasks. Task switching may increase productivity…
Postdoctoral training is a career stage often described as a demanding and anxiety-laden time when many promising PhDs see their academic dreams slip away due to circumstances beyond their control. We use a unique data set of academic…
This work analyses the links between individual research performance and academic rank. A typical bibliometric methodology is used to study the performance of all Italian university researchers active in the hard sciences, for the period…
Many researchers assume that, for software analytics, "more data is better." We write to show that, at least for learning defect predictors, this may not be true. To demonstrate this, we analyzed hundreds of popular GitHub projects. These…
Measuring developer productivity is a topic that has attracted attention from both academic research and industrial practice. In the age of AI coding assistants, it has become even more important for both academia and industry to understand…