Quantified Self for Developers

Abstract

Quantified Self is the process of an individual self-tracking his biological, physical, behavioral or environmental information. This is a relatively recent topic that has been generating an increasingly higher amount of interest and traction that began with the launch of smartphones. Since then, people's phones started acting more as personal devices and bundling sensors like accelerometers, gyroscopes and dedicated health processors. These, just by themselves, can be used to gather some data about the user, like sleep analysis and fitness activity. The rise of the smartwatches has contributed even more to the awareness of Quantified Self, as personal analytic data can be obtained in an even easier and more accurate way, since this kind of devices is in constant contact with our skin. This allows for relevant data like the user's heart rate to be continuously monitored and analyzed.Applied to software development, and more specifically to software developers themselves, personal and team metrics can easily be acquired from widely used project management and code quality software, of which some examples are GitHub, JIRA and Bugzilla. This data can then be correlated with the personal analytics mentioned above to measure productivity and happiness, not only of a single person, but also of the team as a whole. Happiness is a metric used mostly on agile software development teams, and called that way based on the assumption that the success is based on the well-being of a team, which is consequently more efficient and productive the happier it is. There are currently no applications that correlate both personal and work-related metrics, and these together can be used to detect issues in order to aid in finding improvements to a person's habits and workflow.As a result of this work, a platform was developed, with four separate applications: one for iOS, one cross-platform application for Android and iOS, a web client application and, finally, a server application.The iOS application, QuantiDev, allows for the acquisition of personal data, gathered from the phone and connected devices like smartwatches and fitness trackers, and for the correlation of that same data with work-related information. The cross-platform application, InteractDev, is a note-taking and interaction evaluation application, which on top of allowing for the sharing of interaction notes between team members, also provides the platform with data about the health of an interaction between the same team members. The web client application, QuantiDev Web, allows for the management of developers and their teams, data acquisition, generation of charts and the analysis of data about these teams by their leaders. Finally, the developed server application, quantiserver, establishes the connection between the three other applications along with being tasked with the acquisition of work-related data from external services and scheduled maintenance tasks.This platform has, then, the objective of helping software developers and the teams they are part of, identifying patterns, problems and, as a result, improve both their personal and work life.A validation phase was conducted, in order to validate the concept behind the platform, by software developers with experience of working in teams and of being a leader in these same teams. The results obtained confirmed that software developers feel that their productivity may be affected by personal and external factors, and revealed a great interest in a platform like the one that was developed.