Productivity Workshop Ideas

Posted 2025-08-15

Suppose you were going to build a one-day hands-on tutorial for software engineers on what “productivity” means and how to observe it (which might or might not include measuring it quantitatively). You have 6x30 minutes to talk and 4x45 minutes for practical exercises. (Yes, that’s only six hours, but you need to leave time for questions, coffee breaks, lunch, etc.) If each of those six slots is built around one particular research paper, what are the papers? And what are the four exercises?

Please:

Peer-reviewed research papers please, not opinion pieces from industry pundits.
Papers, not books (but I’ll accept chapters from books as “papers”).
Tools and data used in the exercises has to be openly accessible.

If you have suggestions, please [email me][email], and thank you in advance. If there are enough useful comments, I’ll organize an online discussion of this.

Why productivity? Because it affords a good mix of “how do we collect and analyze data?”, “when are quantitative and qualitative analysis the right tools?”, and “how do we operationalize a question like this?” It’s also very topical—most discussions of the impact of AI are vacuous because we’re arguing about performance improvements without first defining performance—and there’s a lot of research out there to draw on. I also hope it will draw interest from both the research community and research-friendly practitioners.

Update

Beller et al 2021: Moritz Beller, Vince Orgovan, Spencer Buja, and Thomas Zimmermann: “Mind the Gap: On the Relationship Between Automatically Measured and Self-Reported Productivity” IEEE Software, 38(5), 2021, 10.1109/MS.2020.3048200.
Czerwinski et al 2003: Mary Czerwinski, Greg Smith, Tim Regan, Brian Meyers, George G. Robertson, and Gary K. Starkweather: “Toward Characterizing the Productivity Benefits of Very Large Displays” Interact, 3, 2003.
Forsgren et al 2021: Nicole Forsgren, Margaret-Anne Storey, Chandra Maddila, Tom Zimmermann, Brian Houck, and Jenna Butler: “The SPACE of Developer Productivity: There’s More to It Than You Think”. ACM Queue, 19(1), 2021, 10.1145/3454122.3454124.
Hicks et al 2024: Catherine M. Hicks, Carol S. Lee, and Morgan Ramsey: “Developer Thriving: Four Sociocognitive Factors That Create Resilient Productivity on Software Teams” IEEE Software, 41(4), 2024, 10.1109/MS.2024.3382957.
Meyer et al 2014: André N. Meyer, Thomas Fritz, Gail C. Murphy, and Thomas Zimmermann: “Software Developers’ Perceptions of Productivity” FSE‘14, 2014, 10.1145/2635868.2635892.
Murphy-Hill et al 2021: Emerson Murphy-Hill, Ciera Jaspan, Caitlin Sadowski, David Shepherd, Michael Phillips, Collin Winter, Andrea Knight, Edward Smith and Matthew Jorde: “What Predicts Software Developers’ Productivity?” IEEE Trans. Software Engineering, 47(3), 10.1109/TSE.2019.2900308.
Noda 2023: Abi Noda, Margaret-Anne Storey, Nicole Forsgren, and Michaela Greiler: “DevEx: What Actually Drives Productivity” ACM Queue, 21(4), 2023, 10.1145/3595878.
Prechelt 2019: Lutz Prechelt: “The Mythical 10x Programmer” In Sadowski & Thomas Zimmermann (eds.): Rethinking Productivity in Software Engineering, Apress, 2019, 978-1484242209.
Sadowski & Zimmermann 2019: Caitlin Sadowski and Thomas Zimmermann (eds.): Rethinking Productivity in Software Engineering. Apress, 2019, 978-1484242209.
Sedano et al 2017: Todd Sedano, Paul Ralph, and Cécile Péraire: “Software Development Waste” Proc. ICSE‘17, 2017, 10.1109/ICSE.2017.20.
Storey et al 2022: Margaret-Anne Storey, Brian Houck, and Thomas Zimmermann: “How Developers and Managers Define and Trade Productivity for Quality” Proc. CHASE‘22, 2022, 10.1145/3528579.3529177.