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Cannabis is one of the most common mind-altering substances. It is used both medicinally and recreationally and is enmeshed in a complex and changing legal landscape. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some software developers may use…
Psychoactive substances, which influence the brain to alter perceptions and moods, have the potential to have positive and negative effects on critical software engineering tasks. They are widely used in software, but that use is not well…
What factors impact the comprehensibility of code? Previous research suggests that expectation-congruent programs should take less time to understand and be less prone to errors. We present an experiment in which participants with…
Affects---emotions and moods---have an impact on cognitive activities and the working performance of individuals. Development tasks are undertaken through cognitive processes, yet software engineering research lacks theory on affects and…
We investigate how code obfuscation influences human understanding of programs through an output-prediction task. To study this effect, we construct multiple levels of obfuscation, ranging from unobfuscated code to transformations involving…
Developers interrupting their participation in a project might slowly forget critical information about the code, such as its intended purpose, structure, the impact of external dependencies, and the approach used for implementation.…
Background: Despite similar education and background, programmers can exhibit vast differences in efficacy. While research has identified some potential factors, such as programming experience and domain knowledge, the effect of these…
Does the choice of programming language affect energy consumption? Previous highly visible studies have established associations between certain programming languages and energy consumption. A causal misinterpretation of this work has led…
Predictive coding, once used in only a small fraction of legal and business matters, is now widely deployed to quickly cull through increasingly vast amounts of data and reduce the need for costly and inefficient human document review.…
For more than thirty years, it has been claimed that a way to improve software developers' productivity and software quality is to focus on people. The underlying assumption seems to be that "happy and satisfied software developers perform…
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…
The concept of a 'Ballmer Peak' was first proposed in 2007, postulating that there exists a very specific blood alcohol content which confers superhuman programming ability. More generally, there is a commonly held belief among software…
Recently, workforce shortage has become a popular issue in information technology (IT). One solution to increasing the workforce supply is to increase the number of female IT professionals. This is because there is gender imbalance in…
Nowadays, Computer Science tightly entered all spheres of human activity. To improve quality and speed of development process, it is important to help programmers improve their working conditions. This paper proposes a vision on exploring…
In this paper, we describe the research on how perceptual load can affect programming performance in people with symptoms of Attention Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). We asked developers to complete the Barkley Deficits in…
The increase in performance and power of computing systems requires the wider use of program optimizations. The goal of performing optimizations is not only to reduce program runtime, but also to reduce other computer resources including…
There are repetitive patterns in strategies of manipulating source code. For example, modifying source code before acquiring knowledge of how a code works is a depth-first style and reading and understanding before modifying source code is…
The study of affects (i.e., emotions, moods) in the workplace has received a lot of attention in the last 15 years. Despite the fact that software development has been shown to be intellectual, creative, and driven by cognitive activities,…
How much does AI assistance impact developer productivity? To date, the software engineering literature has provided a range of answers, targeting a diversity of outcomes: from perceived productivity to speed on task and developer…
Quantitative research relies heavily on coding, and coding errors are relatively common even in published research. In this paper, we examine whether individuals are more or less likely to check their code depending on the results they…