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In their efforts to determine how technology affects the software development process, researchers often overlook organizational and social issues. The authors report on two experiments to discover how developers spend their time. They describe how noncoding activities can use up development time and how even a reluctance to use e-mail can influence the development process. The first experiment was to see how programmers thought they spent their time by having them fill out a modified time card reporting their activities, which we called a time diary. In the second experiment, we used direct observation to calibrate and validate the use of time diaries, which helped us evaluate how time was actually being used.>
Perry et al. (Fri,) studied this question.