A Survey on the Effects of Working Conditions on Programming Efficiency in an Educational Environment

A recurrent concern of instructors and managers in learning and industrial sectors is how to organise the working environment to increase the productivity in tasks such as programming and software testing. Evidence of the increasing interest from different domains in this topic is the growing amount of research that has been published on physical factors (e.g., product, personnel, project and process), programming tasks (e.g., tests, questionnaires, programming, testing and debugging), and assessment methods (e.g., time, software metrics and academic grading). The objective of this paper is to survey the literature and to enable one to gain valuable insights into the relevance of physical factors to improve programming efficiency, especially in a learning environment. This study also makes recommendations on the techniques that can provide further experience for learners before joining the industrial sector. Finally, this survey suggests research directions, including an analysis of the correlation between physical factors and measurable productivity.