How to facilitate programmer's coding work cross-mobile, minimizing task resumption costs and maximizing productivity?

Macalester College

 In this paper, authors explore how software might help programmers make productive use of their time while away from their workspace. It explores how to facilitate programmers’ mobile work practices and cross-device work as subjects express interest in work more grounded in their existing code tasks. The paper introduces Mercury, a mobile programming tool that auto-generates microtasks based on programmers’ existing code. 

Mercury: Empowering Programmers’ Mobile Work Practices with Microproductivity 

Williams, A., Kaur, H., Iqbal, S., White, R., Teevan, J., Fourney, A., (2019) Mercury: Empowering Programmers’ Mobile Work Practices with Microproductivity. University of Waterloo, University of Michigan, Microsoft Research. UIST '19, October 20–23, 2019, New Orleans, LA, USA. DOI: 10.1145/3332165.3347932

Mercury: Empowering Programmers’ Mobile Work Practices with Microproductivity

A microproductivity system integrated with Visual Studio Code (VSCode) that automatically generates mobile-friendly, short programming-related tasks, or micro-tasks, to support programmers’ needs and desires for task continuation. When a user decides to go mobile, Mercury uses the current state of their files to generate microtasks that can be routed to the user to make meaningful progress in their work while they are away from their workstation. Users access these microtasks from their mobile device using the Mercury mobile app and can complete their auto-generated microtasks at their own pace and leisure. 

Mercury (Programmer's tool for micro-productivity) 

1. Contextual Inquiry 
2. Online Survey 
3. Mercury Design 
4. Experiment Design 
5. Evaluation


Methodology (Mercury: Empowering Programmers’ Mobile Work Practices with Microproductivity)

1. The user study results highlight how Mercury enhances mobile programming experiences. Participants found value in Mercury’s interface and were able to make meaningful progress with little effort or attention. 
2. Mercury supported continuation of tasks across devices with seamless transfer of task progress, and interacting with Mercury’s microtasks enabled participants to easily resume coding upon returning to their workstation. 
3. The utility of Mercury’s tasks understandably varied between individual’s and their unique contexts. 
4. Participants liked having mobile access to code that had recently been written on the desktop and being able to synchronize information across devices
5. In terms of task reassumption support, the reports suggest Mercury positively affected participants’ resumption processes.

Results (Mercury: Empowering Programmers’ Mobile Work Practices with Microproductivity)

1. The lab study’s design was strongly grounded in observations made in the field, so further studies are needed to claim that the same observations may be seen in-the-wild or consistently over time. 
2. The evaluation does not compare microproductivity tools to nonmicroproductivity tools for on-the-go work. 
3. The study’s population consisted primarily of professional and experienced software engineers at a large technology corporation. 
4. Future research is needed to understand how Mercury can be adapted to scenarios where documentation is significantly limited or unavailable entirely. 



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