Do moods affect programmers’ debug performance?

Abstract

There is much research that shows people's mood can affect their activities. This paper argues that this also applies to programmers, especially their debugging. Literature-based framework is presented linking programming with various cognitive activities as well as linking cognitive activities with moods. Further, the effect of mood on debugging was tested in two experiments. In the first experiment, programmers (n = 72) saw short movie clips selected for their ability to provoke specific moods. Afterward, they completed a debugging test. Results showed the video clips had a significant effect on programmers' debugging performance; especially, there was a significant difference after watching low-and high-arousalevoking video clips. In the second experiment, programmers' mood was manipulated by asking participants (n = 19) to dry run algorithms for at least 16 min. They performed some physical exercises before continuing dry running algorithms again. The results showed a significant increase in arousal and valence that coincided with an improvement in programmers' task performance after the physical exercises. Together, this suggests that programmers' moods influence some programming tasks such as debugging.

The Work Life of Developers: Activities, Switches and Perceived Productivity

“…As further examples, Boehm looked at factors such as the hiring of people and the use of language and tools, and their impact on improving development output [4] and Vasilescu et al examined the influence of project-switching on productivity [21]. More recent studies have also looked more at soft factors on the individual level, such as the correlation of affective states and self-assessed productivity for programming tasks [52], or the impact of mood on performance for debugging tasks [53].…”

Leveraging Biometric Data to Boost Software Developer Productivity

“…The cognitive load experienced by a person during a task affects aspects, such as the likelihood of errors being created, a person's interruptibility and performance [18]- [20]. Similar to cognitive load, valence and arousal are concepts that can be influenced by various factors, such as task difficulty and personality traits [21]- [23], and in turn can influence the outcome, such as the perceived progress and emotions [24]- [26]. According to Russell's circumplex model, arousal and valence are the two cognitive dimensions of emotions [27], [28].…”

“…Several empirical studies have investigated the kind of emotions developers experience, their change over time and their correlation with developers' productivity, also, for instance, by inducing moods and measuring the impact on developers' performance [25], [26], [82]- [84]. Khan et al also investigated whether keyboard and mouse input could be used to measure a developer's mood, but no generic correlation across all study participants was found [85].…”

Mining valence, arousal, and dominance

“…Emotions are the primary drivers of employees when dealing with deadlines, motivation to work, sense-making, human-resource processes, behaviour, and work performance [3]. For example, Graziotin et al [10] and Khan et al [18] adopted the Valence-Arousal-Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored.…”

“…The few studies adopting a VAD approach in software engineering research, e.g., [10,18,29], primarily have observed, measured or queried humans in experimental or quasiexperimental settings while working on software engineering tasks. Instead, this paper mines software repositories using the VAD approach, as this allows automatic, non-intrusive, retrospective, real-world assessment of VAD across several thousands individuals (instead of small sample sizes) to determine existing relations between VAD and issue report productivity.…”