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

中文翻译：

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睡眠需求：一夜睡眠不足对新手开发者绩效的影响

我们提出了一个准实验，以使用测试优先开发 (TFD) 的敏捷实践来调查睡眠剥夺是否以及在多大程度上影响了软件开发新手的表现。我们招募了 45 名本科生，并要求他们完成一项编程任务。参与者中有23人同意在执行任务前一晚保持清醒，而22人则正常睡觉。我们分析了两组参与者交付的实现的质量（即功能正确性）、他们编写源代码的参与度（即在处理编程任务时在 IDE 中执行的活动量）以及应用 TFD 的能力（即，参与者能够应用这种做法的程度）。通过比较两组参与者，我们发现，一个晚上的睡眠剥夺会导致实施质量下降 50%。有明显证据表明，开发商的参与度和他们应用 TFD 的能力受到了负面影响。我们的结果还表明，睡眠不足的开发人员对源代码中的语法错误进行了更多修复。我们得出结论，睡眠剥夺可能对软件开发活动产生破坏性影响。通过将睡眠研究与软件工程研究界最近感兴趣的其他心理生理因素相结合，结果为提高开发人员的绩效提供了机会。我们的结果还表明，睡眠不足的开发人员对源代码中的语法错误进行了更多修复。我们得出结论，睡眠剥夺可能对软件开发活动产生破坏性影响。通过将睡眠研究与软件工程研究界最近感兴趣的其他心理生理因素相结合，结果为提高开发人员的绩效提供了机会。我们的结果还表明，睡眠不足的开发人员对源代码中的语法错误进行了更多修复。我们得出结论，睡眠剥夺可能对软件开发活动产生破坏性影响。通过将睡眠研究与软件工程研究界最近感兴趣的其他心理生理因素相结合，结果为提高开发人员的绩效提供了机会。