High Productivity Programmers Use Effective Task Processes in Unit-Testing

Software productivity is influenced by how efficiently programmers execute tasks assigned to them. For executing a task, programmers execute several steps. How the execution of these steps is organized by a programmer is referred to as task process. While overall software process has been well studied, the impact of task processes has not been studied much. In this work, we study the impact of task processes on the productivity of programmers. We first model a task process as a Markov chain with each state representing a step, and then study the difference in task processes of high and low productivity programmers using the Euclidean distance between Markov chains. We applied this method in a field study conducted at Robert Bosch Engineering & Business Solutions Limited, a CMMi Level 5 software company. We analyzed the task processes of eighteen programmers from three live model-based unit-testing projects, and modeled them as Markov chains. We compared the task processes used by a programmer for executing similar tasks, and then compared the task processes of programmers within the same group (high/low productivity) and across groups. The results of the study indicate: a) each programmer uses similar task processes for executing similar tasks, though the task processes of a high productivity programmer are more similar than the task processes of a low productivity programmer, b) task processes of high productivity programmers are similar to each other, and c) task processes of a low productivity programmer differ widely from high productivity programmers.