Time pressure: a controlled experiment of test case development and requirements review

REF: Mäntylä M. V., Petersen K., Lehtinen, T. O. A., Lassenius, C. "Time
Pressure - A Controlled Experiment of Test-case Development and Requirements
Review", in Proceedings of the 36th IEEE International Conference
on Software Engineering (ICSE),
pp. 83-94, May 31 - June 7, 2014, Hyderabad, India
Abstract
Time pressure is prevalent in the software industry in which shorter and
shorter deadlines and high customer demands lead to increasingly tight
deadlines. However, the effects of time pressure have received little
attention in software engineering research. We performed a controlled
experiment on time pressure with 97 observations from 54 subjects. Using
a two-by-two crossover design, our subjects performed requirements
review and test case development tasks. We found statistically
significant evidence that time pressure increases efficiency in test
case development (high effect size Cohen’s d=1.279) and in requirements
review (medium effect size Cohen’s d=0.650). However, we found no
statistically significant evidence that time pressure would decrease
effectiveness or cause adverse effects on motivation, frustration or
perceived performance. We also investigated the role of knowledge but
found no evidence of the mediating role of knowledge in time pressure as
suggested by prior work, possibly due to our subjects. We conclude that
applying moderate time pressure for limited periods could be used to
increase efficiency in software engineering tasks that are well
structured and straight forward.