Need for sleep: the impact of a night of sleep deprivation on novice developers' performance

Abstract

We present a quasi-experiment to investigate whether, and to what extent, sleep deprivation impacts the performanceof novice software developers using the agile practice of test-first development (TFD). We recruited 45 undergraduates, andasked them to tackle a programming task. Among the participants, 23 agreed to stay awake the night before carrying out thetask, while 22 slept normally. We analyzed the quality (i.e., the functional correctness) of the implementations delivered by theparticipants in both groups, their engagement in writing source code (i.e., the amount of activities performed in the IDE whiletackling the programming task) and ability to apply TFD (i.e., the extent to which a participant is able to apply this practice). Bycomparing the two groups of participants, we found that a single night of sleep deprivation leads to a reduction of 50% in thequality of the implementations. There is notable evidence that the developers’ engagement and their prowess to apply TFD arenegatively impacted. Our results also show that sleep-deprived developers make more fixes to syntactic mistakes in the sourcecode. We conclude that sleep deprivation has possibly disruptive effects on software development activities. The results openopportunities for improving developers’ performance by integrating the study of sleep with other psycho-physiological factors inwhich the software engineering research community has recently taken an interest in.