This is a helper-project written in C# that maps application data (process-name, window-titles) to an activity (e.g. coding, work unrelated webbrowsing, email). It was originally developed for and is used in PersonalAnalytics.
We are currently porting it from the PersonalAnalytics project to a separate project over here. As soon as it's ready, it will be released to the Nuget package manager, for easy re-use. Since we're porting it from the .Net Framework 4.5 to .Net Core 2.0, it can also be run on Mac/Linux in the future.
The mapping is based on work by André N. Meyer, Gail C. Murphy, Thomas Zimmermann and Thomas Fritz, and their publication titles "The work life of developers: activities, switches and perceived productivity", as published in the Transactions on Software Engineering Journal in 2017. The mapping scheme is described in more detail in the publication's appendix.
Simply call ApplicationToActivityMapper.Map(string process, string window). The output will be one of the following categories:
- Development related activities: DevCode, DevDebug, DevReview, DevVc
- Planning
- ReadWriteDocument
- InstantMessaging,
- Unknown (if it couldn't be mapped)
For example, the entry ApplicationToActivityMapper.Map("Outlook", "Inbox - email@host.com - Outlook") would result in Email.
Or, ApplicationToActivityMapper.Map("VisualStudio", "ApplicationToActivityMapper - VisualStudio") would result in DevCode.
André Meyer (ameyer@ifi.uzh.ch)