Appendix for "Are Happy Developers more Productive? The Correlation of Affective States of Software Developers and their self-assessed Productivity"

<p>This file contains the guidelines, which were employed to administer the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) [1] and the productivity questionnaire to the participants of the experiment reported in [2]. The guidelines have been written by following the technical manual by Lang et al. [3].</p> <p>This document will be updated while preparing the camera-ready version of the paper. The camera-ready version of the paper will be made available on Figshare as well (the publisher permits that)</p> <p> </p> <p>[1] Bradley, L.: Measuring emotion: the self-assessment semantic differential. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry. 25, 1, 49–59 (1994).<br>[2] Graziotin, D., Wang, X., & Abrahamsson, P.. Are Happy Developers more Productive? The Correlation of Affective States of Software Developers and their self-assessed Productivity. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES 2013). LNCS vol. 7983, pp. 50-64.<br>[3] Lang, P.J. et al.: International affective picture system (IAPS): Technical manual and affective ratings. Gainesville FL NIMH Center for the study of emotion and attention University of Florida. Technical Report A–6 (1999).</p> <p> </p

A influência de fatores na produtividade do desenvolvimento de software de acordo com um modelo de estruturas teóricas

This work presents an evidence-based model describing the effects of a set of factors on software development productivity, obtained through an evidence synthesis method in Software Engineering. Thus, the relationships among this set and the software development productivity (observed phenomena) are described as results of combining theoretical structures capable of expressing and dealing with differences between different effects and uncertainties varying according to the types of studies found in the literature. Besides, to evaluate the model found, its findings are confronted with a survey capturing the practitioners’ perception (managers and leaders of software projects in Brazilian organizations). The degree of agreement between research (the model) and practice (the practitioners’ perception) shows that scientific knowledge does not differ considerably from the reality experienced by software projects when both of them refer to the influence of factors on software development productivity. The impression that research and practice on the theme go through different paths persists. According to this work, the reasons for this impression are more related to the use of non-standardized and, perhaps, inappropriate measures used to perceive and monitor the influence of factors as well as to measure the software development productivityEste trabalho apresenta um modelo baseado em evidências que descreve efeitos de alguns fatores na produtividade do desenvolvimento de software, obtidos através de um método de síntese de evidências em Engenharia de Software. Deste modo, as relações entre um conjunto de fatores e a produtividade do desenvolvimento de software (fenômenos observados) são descritas como resultados da combinação de estruturas teóricas capazes de expressar e tratar diferenças entre efeitos e incertezas variadas de acordo com os tipos de estudos primários encontrados na literatura. Além disso, para avaliar o modelo encontrado, seus achados são confrontados com uma pesquisa de opinião realizada para capturar a percepção de profissionais da prática (gestores e líderes de projetos de software em organizações brasileiras). O grau de concordância entre a pesquisa (o modelo) e a prática (a percepção dos profissionais) demonstra que, aparentemente, o conhecimento científico não diverge consideravelmente da realidade vivenciada pelos projetos de software no Brasil, quando ambos se referem à influência de fatores na produtividade do desenvolvimento de software. Persiste a impressão, entretanto, de que a pesquisa e a prática no tema percorrem caminhos distintos. De acordo com este trabalho, a impressão do distanciamento parece estar relacionadas à questão do uso de medidas não-padronizadas e, talvez, inapropriadas para mensurar os fatores e a produtividade do desenvolvimento de softwar

Are Happy Developers More Productive? PROFES 2013 Presentation

<p>This is the presentation for the paper "Are Happy Developers More Productive? The Correlation of Affective States of Software Developers and their self-assessed Productivity" presented at the 14th International Conference on Product-focused Software Process Improvement, 12-14 June, Paphos, Cyprus.</p> <p>The final publication is available at link.springer.com but an eprint is also availabe.</p> <p>Abstract:</p> <p>For decades now, it has been claimed that a way to improve software developers’ productivity is to focus on people. Indeed, while human factors have been recognized in Software Engineering research, few empirical investigations have attempted to verify the claim. Development tasks are undertaken through cognitive processing abilities. Affective states – emotions, moods, and feelings - have an impact on work-related behaviors, cognitive processing activities, and the productivity of individuals. In this paper, we report an empirical study on the impact of affective states on software developers’ performance while programming. Two affective states dimensions are positively correlated with self-assessed productivity. We demonstrate the value of applying psychometrics in Software Engineering studies and echo a call to valorize the human, individualized aspects of software developers. We introduce and validate a measurement instrument and a linear mixed-effects model to study the correlation of affective states and the productivity of software developers.</p