Are Happy Developers more Productive? The Correlation of Affective States of Software Developers and their self-assessed Productivity
This addresses the human factors in software engineering by providing empirical evidence for the impact of affective states on developer productivity, though it is incremental as it builds on existing claims with new validation.
The study tackled the problem of whether software developers' affective states (emotions, moods, feelings) correlate with their self-assessed productivity, finding that two affective state dimensions are positively correlated with productivity.
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.