What happens when software developers are (un)happy

Abstract

The growing literature on affect among software developers mostly reports on the linkage between happiness, software quality, and developer productivity. Understanding happiness and unhappiness in all its components -positive and negative emotions and moods -is an attractive and important endeavor. Scholars in industrial and organizational psychology have suggested that understanding happiness and unhappiness could lead to cost-effective ways of enhancing working conditions, job performance, and to limiting the occurrence of psychological disorders. Our comprehension of the consequences of (un)happiness among developers is still too shallow, being mainly expressed in terms of development productivity and software quality. In this paper, we study what happens when developers are happy and unhappy while developing software. Qualitative data analysis of responses given by 317 questionnaire participants identified 42 consequences of unhappiness and 32 of happiness. We found consequences of happiness and unhappiness that are beneficial and detrimental for developers' mental well-being, the software development process, and the produced artifacts. Our classification scheme, available as open data enables new happiness research opportunities of cause-effect type, and it can act as a guideline for practitioners for identifying damaging effects of unhappiness and for fostering happiness on the job.Note:. the present PDF is the accepted version of Graziotin, D., Fagerholm, F., Wang, X., & Abrahamsson, P. (2018). What happens when software developers are (un)happy .

An Empirical Assessment on Affective Reactions of Novice Developers When Applying Test-Driven Development

“…Considering the results regarding the (negative) affective reactions to the implementation and testing phases, we suggest that, for greenfield development tasks, developers could skip TDD for few initial iterations and rely on their preferred development approach. This should not have an impact on performance but could reduce their negative affect which, in turn, could impact motivation and job satisfaction [17,38].…”

“…Recent studies have leveraged affective states of developers to improve requirements engineering [8], software development [17], and software evolution [31]. Further, sentiment analysis has been applied to study the collaborative facets of software development [15].…”

Happiness and the Productivity of Software Engineers

“…Answering these questions is very challenging. We spent a year designing a comprehensive study [4,6] to address them. We needed data from as many software developers as possible.…”

“…We coded the open-ended questions and found dozens of causes and consequences of happiness and unhappiness while developing software [4,6].…”

Emotional Contagion in Open Software Collaborations

“…Emotional Contagion occurs when the affect inherent in a behavior, or in the case of online collaboration a message, is shared with others. The emotional content of the message can alter the affect associated with people who read the message, enacting a propagation of affect that resembles the spread of a contagion [4].…”