Retrospecting on Work and Productivity A Study on Self-Monitoring Software Developers ’ Work

One way to improve the productivity of knowledge workers is to increase their self-awareness about productivity at work through self-monitoring. Yet, little is known about expectations of, the experience with, and the impact of self-monitoring in the workplace. To address this gap, we studied software developers, as one community of knowledge workers. We used an iterative, user-feedbackdriven development approach (N=20) and a survey (N=413) to infer design elements for workplace self-monitoring, which we then implemented as a technology probe called WorkAnalytics. We field-tested these design elements during a three-week study with software development professionals (N=43). Based on the results of the field study, we present design recommendations for self-monitoring in the workplace, such as using experience sampling to increase the awareness about work and to create richer insights, the need for a large variety of different metrics to retrospect about work, and that actionable insights, enriched with benchmarking data from co-workers, are likely needed to foster productive behavior change and improve collaboration at work. Our work can serve as a starting point for researchers and practitioners to build self-monitoring tools for the workplace. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3134714 Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-143089 Originally published at: Meyer, André; Murphy, Gail C. ; Zimmermann, Thomas; Fritz, Thomas (2017). Retrospecting on Work and Productivity A Study on Self-Monitoring Software Developers’ Work. PACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 1(CSCW):1-24. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3134714 79 Design Recommendations for Self-Monitoring in the Workplace: Studies in Software Development ANDRE N. MEYER, University of Zurich GAIL C. MURPHY, University of British Columbia THOMAS ZIMMERMANN, Microsoft Research THOMAS FRITZ, University of Zurich and University of British Columbia One way to improve the productivity of knowledge workers is to increase their self-awareness about productivity at work through self-monitoring. Yet, little is known about expectations of, the experience with, and the impact of self-monitoring in the workplace. To address this gap, we studied software developers, as one community of knowledge workers. We used an iterative, user-feedback-driven development approach (N=20) and a survey (N=413) to infer design elements for workplace self-monitoring, which we then implemented as a technology probe called WorkAnalytics. We field-tested these design elements during a three-week study with software development professionals (N=43). Based on the results of the field study, we present design recommendations for self-monitoring in the workplace, such as using experience sampling to increase the awareness about work and to create richer insights, the need for a large variety of different metrics to retrospect about work, and that actionable insights, enriched with benchmarking data from co-workers, are likely needed to foster productive behavior change and improve collaboration at work. Our work can serve as a starting point for researchers and practitioners to build self-monitoring tools for the workplace. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → User studies; Field studies; • Software and its engineering → Software creation and management; Additional