Karina Kohl

Karina Kohl, Rafael Prikladnicki

Software engineering is not only about technical solutions. To a large extent, it is also concerned with organizational issues, project management, and human behavior. There are serious gender issues that can severely limit the participation of women in science and engineering careers. It is claimed that women lead differently than men and are more collaboration-oriented, communicative, and less aggressive than their male counterparts. However, when talking with women in technology companies' leadership roles, a list of problems women face grows fast. We invite women in software engineering management roles to answer the questions from an empathy map canvas. We used thematic analysis for coding the answers and group the codes into themes. From the analysis, we identified seven themes that support us to list the main challenges they face in their careers.

Karina Kohl, Bogdan Vasilescu, Rafael Prikladnicki

Background: Multitasking is usual in software development. It is the ability to stop working on a task, switch to another, and return eventually to the first one, as needed or as scheduled. Multitasking, however, comes at a cognitive cost: frequent context-switches can lead to distraction, sub-standard work, and even greater stress. Aims: This paper reports a replication experiment where we gathered data on a group of developers from a software development company from industry on a large collection of projects stored in GitLab repositories. Method: We reused the developed models and methods from the original study for measuring the rate and breadth of a developers' context-switching behavior, and we study how context-switching affects their productivity. We applied semi-structured interviews, replacing the original survey, to some of the developers to understand the reasons for and perceptions of multitasking. Results: We found out that industry developers multitask as much as OSS developers focusing more (on fewer projects), and working more repetitively from one day to the next is associated with higher productivity, but there is no effect for higher multitasking. Some commons reasons make them multitask: dependencies, personal interests, and social relationships. Conclusions: Short context change, less than three minutes, did not impact results from industry developers; however, more than that, it brings a feeling of left the previous tasks behind. So, it is proportional to how much context is switched: as bigger the context and bigger the interruption, it is worst to come back.