Programmer´s Performance with the Keystroke as an Indicator: A Further Study

This paper represents a follow-up work that investigates the keystroke pattern of programmers to understand their intellectual behavior while writing code. In this study, we conducted one case study in order to check how students would perform under pressure, both similarity and difference from the previous experiment. The motivation was that observing how programmers corresponded to pressure in terms of performance might help us to better understanding their cognitive process since pressure is indispensable daily programming job in industrial settings. We asked twenty-four second-year undergraduate students to conduct a case study in which they implemented a program. Their numbers of the keystrokes were recorded and their behavior and productivity were analyzed. The case study result demonstrates that there is no close relationship between quality of code and the numbers of keystrokes with programming under pressure. However, it seems that programmers with high performance have high keystroke productivity. Programmers are also more productive under pressure in terms of keystrokes.