247 research outputs found
Happy software developers solve problems better: psychological measurements in empirical software engineering
For more than 30 years, it has been claimed that a way to improve software
developers' productivity and software quality is to focus on people and to
provide incentives to make developers satisfied and happy. This claim has
rarely been verified in software engineering research, which faces an
additional challenge in comparison to more traditional engineering fields:
software development is an intellectual activity and is dominated by
often-neglected human aspects. Among the skills required for software
development, developers must possess high analytical problem-solving skills and
creativity for the software construction process. According to psychology
research, affects-emotions and moods-deeply influence the cognitive processing
abilities and performance of workers, including creativity and analytical
problem solving. Nonetheless, little research has investigated the correlation
between the affective states, creativity, and analytical problem-solving
performance of programmers. This article echoes the call to employ
psychological measurements in software engineering research. We report a study
with 42 participants to investigate the relationship between the affective
states, creativity, and analytical problem-solving skills of software
developers. The results offer support for the claim that happy developers are
indeed better problem solvers in terms of their analytical abilities. The
following contributions are made by this study: (1) providing a better
understanding of the impact of affective states on the creativity and
analytical problem-solving capacities of developers, (2) introducing and
validating psychological measurements, theories, and concepts of affective
states, creativity, and analytical-problem-solving skills in empirical software
engineering, and (3) raising the need for studying the human factors of
software engineering by employing a multidisciplinary viewpoint.Comment: 33 pages, 11 figures, published at Peer
Rethinking the Concept of Commitment in Software Process Improvement
Literature and practice has agreed that commitment plays an important role in software process improvement (SPI)[1] initiatives. However, the concept of commitment has not been seriously researched in the SPI community. This paper seeks to provide a synthesis of contemporary commitment literature β giving SPI research and practice a new perspective on the phenomenon. It is shown that current thinking relies on models of commitment that are flawed in both academic and practical sense. Namely, four misconceptions [2] are identified in current thinking: 1) the assumption of causality in the human cognitive processes, i.e., commitment in this case), 2) the controllability of this process, 3) the notion of a singular commitment construct, and 4) the idea that commitment is an all-positive phenomenon. Implications of these findings for SPI research and practice are discussed
The Contemporary Understanding of User Experience in Practice
User Experience (UX) has been a buzzword in agile literature in recent years.
However, often UX remains as a vague concept and it may be hard to understand
the very nature of it in the context of agile software development. This paper
explores the multifaceted UX literature, emphasizes the multi-dimensional
nature of the concept and organizes the current state-of-the-art knowledge. As
a starting point to better understand the contemporary meaning of UX assigned
by practitioners, we selected four UX blogs and performed an analysis using a
framework derived from the literature review. The preliminary results show that
the practitioners more often focus on interaction between product and user and
view UX from design perspective predominantly. While the economical perspective
receives little attention in literature, it is evident in practitioners
writings. Our study opens up a promising line of request of the contemporary
meaning of UX in practice.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, 3 table
- β¦