Enabling Good Work Habits in Software Developers through Reflective Goal-Setting

Software developers are generally interested in developing better habits to increase their workplace productivity and well-being, but have difficulties identifying concrete goals and actionable strategies to do so. In several areas of life, such as the physical activity and health domain, self-refle...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on software engineering 2021-09, Vol.47 (9), p.1872-1885
Main Authors: Meyer, Andre N., Murphy, Gail C., Zimmermann, Thomas, Fritz, Thomas
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Employment
Goal setting
goals
Habits
Informatics
Monitoring
personal analytics
Productivity
reflective goal-setting
self-reflection
Software
Software development
Task analysis
Well being
work habits
workplace awareness
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Summary:Software developers are generally interested in developing better habits to increase their workplace productivity and well-being, but have difficulties identifying concrete goals and actionable strategies to do so. In several areas of life, such as the physical activity and health domain, self-reflection has been shown to be successful at increasing people's awareness about a problematic behavior, motivating them to define a self-improvement goal, and fostering goal-achievement. We therefore designed a reflective goal-setting study to learn more about developers' goals and strategies to improve or maintain good habits at work. In our study, 52 professional software developers self-reflected about their work on a daily basis during two to three weeks, which resulted in a rich set of work habit goals and actionable strategies that developers pursue at work. We also found that purposeful, continuous self-reflection not only increases developers' awareness about productive and unproductive work habits (84.5 percent), but also leads to positive self-improvements that increase developer productivity and well-being (79.6 percent). We discuss how tools could support developers with a better trade-off between the cost and value of workplace self-reflection and increase long-term engagement.
ISSN:0098-5589
1939-3520
DOI:10.1109/TSE.2019.2938525