When we think of productivity, we usually have a vague concept of a rate of work per unit time. Where it gets tricky is in defining "work". On an individual level, work can be easier to define, because developers often have specific concrete tasks that they're assigned. But until they're not, it's not really easy to define progress (well, it's not that easy to define "done" sometimes either, but that's a topic for a later chapter). When you start considering work at the scale of a team or an organization, productivity gets even harder to define, since an individual's productivity might be increased by ignoring every critical request from a teammate, harming the team's overall productivity.
Despite the challenge in defining productivity, there are numerous factors that affect productivity. For example, at the individual level, having the right tools can result in an order of magnitude difference in speed at accomplishing a task. One study I ran found that developers using the Eclipse IDE spent a third of their time just physically navigating between source files<ko05>. With the right navigation aids, developers could be writing code and fixing bugs 30% faster. In fact, some tools like Mylyn automatically bring relevant code to the developer rather than making them navigate to it, greatly increasing the speed which with developers can accomplish a task<kersten06>. Long gone are the days when developers should be using bare command lines and text editors to write code: IDEs can and do greatly increase productivity when used and configured with speed in mind.
Of course, individual productivity is about more than just tools. Studies of workplace productivity show that developers have highly fragmented days, interrupted by meetings, emails, coding, and non-work distractions<meyer17>. These interruptions are often viewed negatively from an individual perspective<northrup16>, but may be highly valuable from a team and organizational perspective. And then, productivity is not just about skills to manage time, but also many other skills that shape developer expertise, including skills in designing architectures, debugging, testing, programming languages, etc.<baltes18> Hiring is therefore about far more than just how quickly and effectively someone can code<bartram16>.
That said, productivity is not just about individual developers. Because communication is a key part of team productivity, an individual's productivity is as much determined by their ability to collaborate and communicate with other developers. In a study spanning dozens of interviews with senior software engineers, Li et al. found that the majority of critical attributes for software engineering skill (productivity included) concerned their interpersonal skills, their communication skills, and their ability to be resourceful within their organization<li15>. Similarly, LaToza et al. found that the primary bottleneck in productivity was communication with teammates, primarily because waiting for replies was slower than just looking something up<latoza06>. Of course, looking something up has its own problems. While StackOverflow is an incredible resource for missing documentation<mamykina11>, it also is full of all kinds of misleading and incorrect information contributed by developers without sufficient expertise to answer questions<barua14>. Finally, because communication is such a critical part of retrieving information, adding more developers to a team has surprising effects. One study found that adding people to a team slowly enough to allow them to onboard effectively could reduce defects, but adding them too fast led to increases in defects<meneely11>.
Another dimension of productivity is learning. Great engineers are resourceful, quick learners<li15>. New engineers must be even more resourceful, even though their instincts are often to hide their lack of expertise from exactly the people they need help from<begel08>. Experienced developers know that learning is important and now rely heavily on social media such as Twitter to follow industry changes, build learning relationships, and discover new concepts and platforms to learn<singer14>. And, of course, developers now rely heavily on web search to fill in inevitable gaps in their knowledge about APIs, error messages, and myriad other details about languages and platforms<xia17>.
Unfortunately, learning is no easy task. One of my earliest studies as a researcher investigated the barriers to learning new programming languages and systems, finding six distinct types of content that are challenging<ko04>. To use a programming platform successfully, people need to overcome _design _ barriers, which are the abstract computational problems that must be solved, independent of the languages and APIs. People need to overcome _selection _ barriers, which involve finding the right abstractions or APIs to achieve the design they have identified. People need to overcome _use _ and _coordination _ barriers, which involve operating and coordinating different parts of a language or API together to achieve novel functionality. People need to overcome _comprehension _ barriers, which involve knowing what can go wrong when using part of a language or API. And finally, people need to overcome _information _ barriers, which are posed by the limited ability of tools to inspect a program's behavior at runtime during debugging. Every single one of these barriers has its own challenges, and developers encounter them every time they are learning a new platform, regardless of how much expertise they have.
Aside from individual and team factors, productivity is also influenced by the particular features of a project's code, how the project is managed, or the environment and organizational culture in which developers work<vosburgh84,demarco85>. In fact, these might actually be the _biggest _ factors in determining developer productivity. This means that even a developer that is highly productive individually cannot rescue a team that is poorly structured working on poorly architected code. This might be why highly productive developers are so difficult to recruit to poorly managed teams.
A different way to think about productivity is to consider it from a "waste" perspective, in which waste is defined as any activity that does not contribute to a product's value to users or customers. Sedano et al. investigated this view across two years and eight software development projects in a software development consultancy<sedano17>, contributing a taxonomy of waste:
* *Unnecessarily complex solutions*. The cost of creating a more complicated solution than necessary, a missed opportunity to simplify features, user interface, or code.
* *Extraneous cognitive load*. The costs of unneeded expenditure of mental energy, such as poorly written code, context switching, confusing APIs, or technical debt.
* *Psychological distress*. The costs of burdening the team with unhelpful stress arising from low morale, pace, or interpersonal conflict.
* *Waiting/multitasking*. The cost of idle time, often hidden by multi-tasking, due to slow tests, missing information, or context switching.
* *Knowledge loss*. The cost of re-acquiring information that the team once knew.
One could imagine using these concepts to refine processes and practices in a team, helping both developers and managers be more aware of sources of waste that harm productivity.
Of course, productivity is not only shaped by professional and organizational factors, but personal ones as well. Consider, for example, an engineer that has friends, wealth, health care, health, stable housing, sufficient pay, and safety: they likely have everything they need to bring their full attention to their work. In contrast, imagine an engineer that is isolated, has immense debt, has no health care, has a chronic disease like diabetes, is being displaced from an apartment by gentrification, has lower pay than their peers, or does not feel safe in public. Any one of these factors might limit an engineer's ability to be productive at work; some people might experience multiple, or even all of these factors, especially if they are a person of color in the United States, who has faced a lifetime of racist inequities in school, health care, and housing. Because of the potential for such inequities to influence someone's ability to work, managers and organizations need to make space for surfacing this inequities at work, so that teams can acknowledgement them, plan around them, and ideally address them through targeted supports. Anything less tends to make engineers feel unsupported, which will only decrease their motivation to contribute to a team. These widely varying conceptions of productivity reveal that programming in a software engineering context is about far more than just writing a lot of code. It's about coordinating productively with a team, synchronizing your work with an organizations goals, and most importantly, reflecting on ways to change work to achieve those goals more effectively.
