Authors: Thomas Fritz, Sebastian Müller

Producing great software requires great productive developers. Yet, what does it really mean for an individual developer to be productive, and what can we do to best help developers to be productive? To answer these questions, research has traditionally focused on measuring a developer’s output and therefore suffered from two drawbacks: the measures can only be calculated after a developer finished her work and these measures do not account for individual differences between developers. The recent advances in biometric sensor technology offer new opportunities to measure a developer’s cognitive and emotional states in real-time and thus allow us to know more about what an individual developer is currently experiencing and what might foster or impede the developer’s productivity. Results from recent research studies demonstrate the potential that biometric data has to accurately predict aspects of a developer’s work, such as perceived task and code difficulty, progress and interruptibility of a developer. This opens up new opportunities for better supporting developers in their work and, for instance, prevent bugs from entering the code, reduce costly interruptions, and foster a better and more productive work day. Our vision is that biometric sensing will be integrated into a developer’s work and that biometrics can be used to boost the productivity of each individual developer.