Houston: We are in Overload

During the flight of Apollo 13, an oxygen tank blew up threatening the lives of the astronauts. When it happened, James Lovell Jr. told the Houston control center, "Hey Houston, we 've had a problem here." Although not as catastrophic, software developers productivity is being threatened by an inundation of information: source code is easier and easier to traverse and to find, email inboxes are stuffed to capacity, RSS feeds provide a continual stream of technology updates, and so on. To enable software developers to work more effectively, software engineering researchers often deliver tools, which produce even more information. The effect of more and more tools producing more and more information is placing developers into overload. It would be reasonable to here a software developer utter, "Houston: We are in overload"! In this talk, I will discuss the quagmire in which software developers are finding themselves, discuss how they are coping based on data collected from the activity of developers, and suggest ways of helping developers regain control.