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Article History

Received: 3 July 2025

Accepted: 11 May 2026

First Online: 9 June 2026

Declarations

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: The design of our study adheres to the essential attributes of the ACM SIGSOFT Empirical Standard “Ethics (Studies with Human Participants)” (ACM SIGSOFT ). Additionally, the peer review of the registered report (Borg et al. ) acted as an independent assessment that the study design meets the ethical standards of the empirical software engineering community. There were no anticipated risks of harm to participants. The task required an estimated time investment of 2–4 hours, similar in nature and duration to programming assessments used in recruitment. All participants who completed that task received a signed copy of Dave Farley’s book “Modern Software Engineering: Doing What Works to Build Better Software Faster” (Farley ) as an incentive to complete the task.

: This study involved voluntary participation by developers who completed programming tasks and questionnaires. Before assigning tasks, we ensured that participants understood their privacy was protected, that the study was intended for academic publication, and that they could withdraw at any time without consequence. Several participants chose to do so. All participants gave informed consent prior to participation.

: Markus Borg is employed by CodeScene, the company behind the CodeScene analysis tool used in this study, including the CodeHealth metric. Dave Hewett, Donald Graham, and Uttam Kini are consultants at Equal Experts, a company offering AI-accelerated software delivery services among other offerings. Dave Farley is an independent consultant and author who runs the YouTube channel Modern Software Engineering. The authors declare that no commercial interests compromised the scientific rigor of the study design, data collection, or analysis.

: Clinical trial number: not applicable.