Today I read a paper titled “Are Happy Developers more Productive? The Correlation of Affective States of Software Developers and their self-assessed Productivity”
The abstract is:
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