‘Context switching’ significantly reduces developer productivity – here’s how GitHub plans to solve this problem

GitHub’s new ‘Copilot Extensions’ offering aims to help deal with a common developer problem known as ‘context switching’ – a term used to express the psychological strain staff face when forced to jump from one task to another.

Experts say that when developers move from one task to another or one environment to another, they can lose focus ITProincreasing workload and impacting overall productivity rates.

GitHub’s new offering, unveiled this week at the Microsoft Build conference, will centralize tools and services in an effort to minimize this burden, ensuring developers avoid burnout while performing tasks across ecosystems and architectures.

Copilot extensions will enable developers to build and deploy in the cloud in natural language using “preferred tools and services” without having to leave the integrated development environment (IDE) or GitHub itself.

The offering integrates with a wide variety of platforms, including DataStax, Docker, Microsoft Azure and Teams, MongoDB, Pangea, Pinecone, Product Science, and several others.

In the announcement, GitHub asked potential users or readers to imagine the struggles a developer faces when, for example, they have to deal with a problem that requires working in multiple environments.

“With enough context, you start to troubleshoot what might be causing it, using bug monitoring tools like Sentry to learn more. Then you need to find a solution, apply the fix, and then deploy it to Azure. Frequent context switching is necessary in this scenario,” GitHub said.

The company then claims that its new product will solve the problems presented in this common scenario by essentially combining the “entire process” and consolidating these tools into one system.

– said Dom Couldwell, head of field engineering for the EMEA region at DataStax, one of the Copilot Extension partners ITPro that this could play a key role in reducing the context switching burden on developers.

“If you’re constantly switching from meetings to coding or looking at different types of coding and back again, it can be difficult to get into and stay in a productive mindset,” Couldwell said.

“The Copilot approach is designed to help developers work on different areas of coding and programming in one place. This makes it easier to avoid the overhead of context switching because developers can work in a way that suits them, rather than switching between different ways of thinking about problems,” he added.

Changing the context significantly reduces productivity

Context switching has been a programming pain for years tests since 2018, detailing how it causes problems by interrupting workflows and leaving projects unattended.

“We found that developers change approximately two-thirds (59%) of their daily tasks, 40% of which require a context switch, and never resume 29% of interrupted/switched tasks,” the study said.

The report also suggested that developers’ work sessions are often “broken up into multiple short sessions” lasting 15 to 30 minutes, with the average developer spending a similar amount of time “reconstructing the working context before resuming interrupted tasks.”