The use of biological signals to understand software development has become more popular in the last few years but poses new challenges with respect to the overall experimental settings. In this paper we present such challenges and the approach we took to overcome them. We illustrate our approach by evaluating two programming situations: pair programming and programming with music. The subjects involved in the experimentation are mostly students, however, in the largest case we involved graduate students coming from industry with at least three years of working experience. The results in general support the validity of this approach and encourage to go further in this research line. Moreover, as a byproduct, the analysis of pair programming confirms, from a biological perspective, early hypotheses that pair programming induces higher level of concentration.

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The performance of programmer is crucial in software developing process. The performance can be influenced by the number of external factors, such as noise, illumination etc. These work uses Electroencephalography to understand the influence of music on programmers mental state. Several(n=8) programmers were given the task according to their proficiency. They were asked to solve different tasks with music and without. The arousal-valence coefficients were calculated in order to understand emotional state of programmers. As results, the mean Arousal and Valence levels are lower and higher respectively, while listening to music. Further researches may use the proposed methods as baseline. Also, we strongly advice to increase the number of samples and asses other factors that could potentially influence the emotional state.