The Effect of Noise on Sofware Engineers' Performance
This addresses a practical problem for software engineers by identifying noise as a specific factor impacting debugging tasks, though it is incremental as it builds on limited prior research in this area.
The study investigated whether noise affects software engineers' performance in comprehending functional requirements and fixing faults in source code, finding that noise significantly worsened performance in fault-fixing but had no significant effect on requirement comprehension.
Background: Noise, defined as an unwanted sound, is one of the commonest factors that could affect people's performance in their daily work activities. The software engineering research community has marginally investigated the effects of noise on software engineers' performance. Aims: We studied if noise affects software engineers' performance in (i) comprehending functional requirements and (ii) fixing faults in the source code. Method: We conducted two experiments with final-year undergraduate students in Computer Science. In the first experiment, we asked 55 students to comprehend functional requirements exposing them or not to noise, while in the second experiment 42 students were asked to fix faults in Java code. Results: The participants in the second experiment, when exposed to noise, had significantly worse performance in fixing faults in the source code. On the other hand, we did not observe any statistically significant difference in the first experiment. Conclusions: Fixing faults in source code seems to be more vulnerable to noise than comprehending functional requirements.