The Shape of Code

Developers working for companies whose business is project based are often involved with multiple projects at the same time. If one project is held up, they have other projects to work on (reducing days when there is no project for them to book their time to).

How many software projects might a developer be working on at any time, and how is their time distributed across projects?

I was hoping that the SEA Data Warehouse dataset would provide some answers. However, while it contains detailed task data on 1,211 software projects, many of the people involved on these projects also worked on projects that are not included in the dataset (or they only worked a few hours a day, or the data is not as complete as claimed).

The 2,271 distinct people in the dataset worked on a total of 210,088 person days, working an average of 190 minutes (3.2 hours) per day. The plot below shows the number of minutes worked on each of the 210,088 person days, in sorted order (code+data):

A 7.5-hour work day contains 450 minutes; what were they doing during the other 260 minutes each day? If people were not working on one of the projects in the dataset, they were presumably working on project(s) that are not in the dataset.

Within the available data, how many projects were individuals working on during various time intervals? The plot below shows the percentage of time intervals (there are more days in the year than weeks, and more weeks than months, and to make the plot easier to interpret the counts for each time interval has been normalised) where a given number of projects were worked on by an individual during a particular time interval, for day/week/month intervals, with fitted exponential models (exponents are: -2.8, -2.2, and -1.6, respectively; code+data):

For the 1-project case, the percentage values are higher for days than weeks, and higher for weeks than months. However, the approximate nature of the fitted regression lines happens to have this the order reversed.

The plotted values are a lower bound for the number of projects an individual worked on within any of the time intervals. The average number of minutes worked per day implies that most people are working on at least two projects every day.