Software developers work on a variety of tasks ranging from the technical, e.g., writing code, to the social, e.g., participating in issue resolution discussions. The amount of work developers perform per week (their work-rate) also varies and depends on project needs and developer schedules. Prior work has shown that while moderate levels of increased technical work and multitasking lead to higher productivity, beyond a certain threshold, they can lead to lowered performance. Here, we study how increases in the short-term work-rate along both the technical and social dimensions are associated with changes in developers' work patterns, in particular communication sentiment, technical productivity, and social productivity. We surveyed active and prolific developers on GitHub to understand the causes and impacts of increased work-rates. Guided by the responses, we developed regression models to study how communication and committing patterns change with increased work-rates and fit those models to large-scale data gathered from traces left by thousands of GitHub developers. From our survey and models, we find that most developers do experience work-rate-increase-related changes in behavior. Most notably, our models show that there is a sizable effect when developers comment much more than their average: the negative sentiment in their comments increases, suggesting an increased level of stress. Our models also show that committing patterns do not change with increased commenting, and vice versa, suggesting that technical and social activities tend not to be multitasked.

Research in student retention is traditionally survey-based, where researchers use questionnaires to collect student data to analyse and to develop student predictive model. The major issues with survey-based study are the potentially low response rates, time consuming and costly. Nevertheless, a large number of datasets that could inform the questions that students are explicitly asked in surveys is commonly available in the external open datasets. This paper describes a new student predictive model that uses commonly available external open data instead of traditional questionnaires/surveys to spot `at-risk' students. Considering the promising behavior of neural networks led us to develop student predictive models to predict `at-risk' students. The results of empirical study for undergraduate students in their first year of study shows that this model can perform as well as or even out-perform traditional survey-based ones. The prediction performance of this study was also compared with that of logistic regression approach. The results shows that neural network slightly improved the overall model accuracy however, according to the model sensitivity, it is suggested that logistic regression performs better for identifying `at-risk' students in their programme of study.