Understanding the Affect of Developers: Theoretical Background and Guidelines for Psychoempirical Software Engineering
This work addresses the need for better theoretical grounding in affect-related studies for software engineering researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing interdisciplinary ideas.
The paper tackles the problem of misconceptions in software engineering research regarding developers' emotions and moods, proposing guidelines for integrating psychology theory and measurements to improve studies.
Affects---emotions and moods---have an impact on cognitive processing activities and the working performance of individuals. It has been established that software development tasks are undertaken through cognitive processing activities. Therefore, we have proposed to employ psychology theory and measurements in software engineering (SE) research. We have called it "psychoempirical software engineering". However, we found out that existing SE research has often fallen into misconceptions about the affect of developers, lacking in background theory and how to successfully employ psychological measurements in studies. The contribution of this paper is threefold. (1) It highlights the challenges to conduct proper affect-related studies with psychology; (2) it provides a comprehensive literature review in affect theory; and (3) it proposes guidelines for conducting psychoempirical software engineering.