A family of experiments about how developers perceive delayed system response time

Collecting and analyzing data about developers working on their development tasks can help improve development practices, finally increasing the productivity of teams. Indeed, monitoring and analysis tools have already been used to collect data from productivity tools. Monitoring inevitably consumes resources and, depending on their extensiveness, may significantly slow down software systems, interfering with developers’ activity. There is thus a challenging trade-off between monitoring and validating applications in their operational environment and preventing the degradation of the user experience. The lack of studies about when developers perceive an overhead introduced in an application makes it extremely difficult to fine-tune techniques working in the field. In this paper, we address this challenge by presenting an empirical study that quantifies how developers perceive overhead. The study consists of three replications of an experiment that involved 99 computer science students in total, followed by a small-scale experimental assessment of the key findings with 12 professional developers. Results show that non-negligible overhead can be introduced for a short period into applications without developers perceiving it and that the sequence in which complex operations are executed influences the perception of the system response time. This information can be exploited to design better monitoring techniques.