Mark Canning
Mark Canning is a software engineer at Google and is a member of the Engineering Productivity Research team. Mark has a B.S. in Math and Physics from the University of California, Berkeley, and previously worked at Arista Networks.
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What Improves Developer Productivity at Google? Code Quality.
Lan Cheng
Andrea Marie Knight Dolan
Nan Zhang
Elizabeth Kammer
Foundations of Software Engineering: Industry Paper (2022)
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Understanding what affects software developer productivity can help organizations choose wise investments in their technical and social environment. But the research literature either focuses on what correlates with developer productivity in realistic settings or focuses on what causes developer productivity in highly constrained settings. In this paper, we bridge the gap by studying software developers at Google through two analyses. In the first analysis, we use panel data to understand which of 39 productivity factors affect perceived developer productivity, finding that code quality, tech debt, infrastructure tools and support, team communication, goals and priorities, and organizational change and process are all causally linked to developer productivity. In the second analysis, we use a lagged panel analysis to strengthen our causal claims. We find that increases in perceived code quality tend to be followed by increased developer productivity, but not vice versa, providing the strongest evidence to date that code quality affects individual developer productivity.
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Enabling the Study of Software Development Behavior with Cross-Tool Logs
Ben Holtz
Edward K. Smith
Andrea Marie Knight Dolan
Elizabeth Kammer
Jillian Dicker
Lan Cheng
IEEE Software, vol. Special Issue on Behavioral Science of Software Engineering (2020)
Preview abstract
Understanding developers’ day-to-day behavior can help answer important research questions, but capturing that behavior at scale can be challenging, particularly when developers use many tools in concert to accomplish their tasks. In this paper, we describe our experience creating a system that integrates log data from dozens of development tools at Google, including tools that developers use to email, schedule meetings, ask and answer technical questions, find code, build and test, and review code. The contribution of this article is a technical description of the system, a validation of it, and a demonstration of its usefulness.
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