Towards the Assessment of Stress and Emotional Responses of a Salutogenesis-Enhanced Software Tool Using Psychophysiological Measurements
This addresses stress alleviation for software developers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing psychological frameworks and tools.
The paper tackles the problem of stress and emotional trauma in software development by proposing a controlled experiment to test whether a Salutogenesis-enhanced static analysis tool can increase fixed quality issues, reduce cognitive load and stress, and induce positive affect in developers, using physiological measurements like cortisol and alpha-amylase levels.
Software development is intellectual, based on collaboration, and performed in a highly demanding economic market. As such, it is dominated by time pressure, stress, and emotional trauma. While studies of affect are emerging and rising in software engineering research, stress has yet to find its place in the literature despite that it is highly related to affect. In this paper, we study stress coping with the affect-laden framework of Salutogenesis, which is a validated psychological framework for enhancing mental health through a feeling of coherence. We propose a controlled experiment for testing our hypotheses that a static analysis tool enhanced with the Salutogenesis model will bring 1) a higher number of fixed quality issues, 2) reduced cognitive load, 3) reduction of the overall stress, and 4) positive affect induction effects to developers. The experiment will make use of validated physiological measurements of stress as proxied by cortisol and alpha-amylase levels in saliva samples, a psychometrically validated measurement of mood and affect disposition, and stress inductors such as a cognitive load task. Our hypotheses, if empirically supported, will lead to the creation of environments, methods, and tools that alleviate stress among developers while enhancing affect on the job and task performance.