Refactoring Technical Support to Reduce Interrupts of Developers
This work addresses process inefficiencies for software development teams, but it is incremental as it applies existing data analysis methods to a specific organizational context.
The paper tackled the problem of reducing interrupts for developers by analyzing six months of technical support chat data to identify process gaps and improvement actions, resulting in specific refactoring actions with both advantages and drawbacks.
In this paper an analysis of a technical support data with the goal of identifying process improvement actions for reducing interrupts is presented. A technical support chat is established and used to provide internal developer support to other development teams which use the software code developed by a core team. The paper shows how data analysis of a 6 months support time helped to identify gaps and action items for improving the technical support process to minimize interrupts from other developer teams. The paper also shows effects (advantages and drawbacks) of refactor actions taken based on this analysis.