The Affect of Software Developers: Common Misconceptions and Measurements

The study of affects (i.e., emotions, moods) in the workplace has received a lot of attention in the last 15 years. Despite the fact that software development has been shown to be intellectual, creative, and driven by cognitive activities, and that affects have a deep influence on cognitive activities, software engineering research lacks an understanding of the affects of software developers. This note provides (1) common misconceptions of affects when dealing with job satisfaction, motivation, commitment, well-being, and happiness; (2) validated measurement instruments for affect measurement; and (3) our recommendations when measuring the affects of software developers.Comment: 2 pages. Research note to be presented at the 2015 IEEE/ACM 8th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE 2015

Assessing Soft Skills for Software Requirements Engineering Processes

Software requirement engineering (SRE) is the process of establishing, documenting, and maintaining software requirements. The goal of this research is to investigate the importance of soft skills in SRE. The data collection was performed through an online questionnaire. Descriptive statistics, principal components analysis (PCA), and stepwise regression techniques were used to analyze the data. A comprehensive review determined the 31 soft skills associated with SRE. There were 122 software development experts in Gaza who participated in the survey. The PCA analysis extracted six factors, named problem-solving, learning willingness, commitment, pressure resilience, critical thinking, and interpersonal skills. The analysis discovered that the level of SRE practice in Gaza is 73.71%. Furthermore, it was determined that 89.2% of respondents have critical thinking skills, and 85% have problem-solving and commitment skills. The result shows that all soft skills factors have strong links to SRE. However, only four soft skills (problem-solving, willingness to learn, pressure tolerance, and critical thinking) were found to have an impact on SRE. Considering these findings, we recommend focusing on the development of soft skills, especially problem-solving and willingness to learn skills, for the team analyzing software system requirements

How Do You Feel, Developer? An Explanatory Theory of the Impact of Affects on Programming Performance

Affects---emotions and moods---have an impact on cognitive activities and the working performance of individuals. Development tasks are undertaken through cognitive processes, yet software engineering research lacks theory on affects and their impact on software development activities. In this paper, we report on an interpretive study aimed at broadening our understanding of the psychology of programming in terms of the experience of affects while programming, and the impact of affects on programming performance. We conducted a qualitative interpretive study based on: face-to-face open-ended interviews, in-field observations, and e-mail exchanges. This enabled us to construct a novel explanatory theory of the impact of affects on development performance. The theory is explicated using an established taxonomy framework. The proposed theory builds upon the concepts of events, affects, attractors, focus, goals, and performance. Theoretical and practical implications are given.Comment: 24 pages, 2 figures. Postprin

Psychological Safety and Norm Clarity in Software Engineering Teams

In the software engineering industry today, companies primarily conduct their work in teams. To increase organizational productivity, it is thus crucial to know the factors that affect team effectiveness. Two team-related concepts that have gained prominence lately are psychological safety and team norms. Still, few studies exist that explore these in a software engineering context. Therefore, with the aim of extending the knowledge of these concepts, we examined if psychological safety and team norm clarity associate positively with software developers' self-assessed team performance and job satisfaction, two important elements of effectiveness. We collected industry survey data from practitioners (N = 217) in 38 development teams working for five different organizations. The result of multiple linear regression analyses indicates that both psychological safety and team norm clarity predict team members' self-assessed performance and job satisfaction. The findings also suggest that clarity of norms is a stronger (30\% and 71\% stronger, respectively) predictor than psychological safety. This research highlights the need to examine, in more detail, the relationship between social norms and software development. The findings of this study could serve as an empirical baseline for such, future work.Comment: Submitted to CHASE'201