Stuck and Frustrated or in Flow and Happy: Sensing Developers´ Emotions and Progress

Software developers working on change tasks commonly experience a broad range of emotions, ranging from happiness all the way to frustration and anger. Research, primarily in psychology, has shown that for certain kinds of tasks, emotions correlate with progress and that biometric measures, such as electro-dermal activity and electroencephalography data, might be used to distinguish between emotions. In our research, we are building on this work and investigate developers´ emotions, progress and the use of biometric measures to classify them in the context of software change tasks. We conducted a lab study with 17 participants working on two change tasks each. Participants were wearing three biometric sensors and had to periodically assess their emotions and progress. The results show that the wide range of emotions experienced by developers is correlated with their perceived progress on the change tasks. Our analysis also shows that we can build a classifier to distinguish between positive and negative emotions in 71.36% and between low and high progress in 67.70% of all cases. These results open up opportunities for improving a developer´s productivity. For instance, one could use such a classifier for providing recommendations at opportune moments when a developer is stuck and making no progress.