What specifically do you want to draw researchers attention to? Can you give an example?
Your example above of "common working loops" and essentially think time around coding has been studied extensively previously. Before making recommendations, I want to first ensure we're on the same page.
Potential keywords (and conferences) are CSCW and CHI.
I'm talking about the secondary work that goes into software, things like environment setup, building artifacts, producing ancillary tooling, and deployment.
I know these might be considered disparate, and I'm intentionally omitting topics that I know are studied, such as formal verification and fuzzing.
I was joking with my spouse, who is a methodologist in medicine, about making a group of researchers set up environments for working on various large open source projects as an example.
Perhaps all of this crosses into operations research?
Though you’re right that code gets more attention.