Identifying wasted effort in the field via developer interaction data

During software projects, several parts of the source code are usually re-written due to imperfect solutions before the code is released. This wasted effort is of central interest to the project management to assure on-time delivery. Although the amount of thrown-away code can be measured from version control systems, stakeholders are more interested in productivity dynamics that reflect the constant change in a software project. In this paper we present a field study of measuring the productivity of a medium-sized J2EE project. We propose a productivity analysis method where productivity is expressed through dynamic profiles - the so-called Micro-Productivity Profiles (MPPs). They can be used to characterize various constituents of software projects such as components, phases and teams. We collected detailed traces of developers' actions using an Eclipse IDE plug-in for seven months of software development throughout two milestones. We present and evaluate profiles of two important axes of the development process: by milestone and by application layers. MPPs can be an aid to take project control actions and help in planning future projects. Based on the experiments, project stakeholders identified several points to improve the development process. It is also acknowledged, that profiles show additional information compared to a naive diff-based approach.