Your heart foretells your performance: Analysis of pre-task heart rate in program comprehension tasks

The physiological states of software developers can impact their work performance. Previous research has indicated that physiological signals, such as heart rate, can be used to predict developers' work performance during tasks. However, conventional methods rely only on heart rate measured during tasks (peri-task), making it difficult to predict and proactively prevent poor work performance prior to beginning tasks. This study aims to enhance predictability by investigating whether heart rate measured before tasks (pre-task) is a valuable resource for predicting work performance. We conducted program comprehension tasks as the primary software development tasks and analyzed pre- and peri-task frequency-domain heart rate variability (HRV) metrics for various timeframes. As a result, we obtained two key findings: 1) Combining pre- and peri-task HRV metrics improved work performance prediction during tasks. 2) Work performance prediction using pre-task HRV metrics achieved comparable estimation performance to that using peri-task HRV metrics for predictions before tasks. These results suggest that, in addition to improving the conventional approaches, pre-task heart rate could also be used to establish a more proactive approach to reducing the risk of performance decline caused by fatigue or stress.