Online Appendix for “Do feelings matter? On the correlation of affective states and the self-assessed productivity in software engineering”

This is the archived Online Appendix for a submitted journal article (to be updated in case of acceptance)

Abstract

For decades now, it has been claimed that a way to improve software developers’ productivity is to focus on people. One important human factor is affective states – emotions, moods, and feelings. Development tasks are undertaken through cognitive processing abilities. Affective states have a linkage to cognitive processing activities and the productivity of individuals. However, while the linkage is acknowledged in Software Engineering research, few empirical investigations have attempted to verify the claim. This article reports an empirical study on the correlation of affective states, conceptualized in three dimensions: valence, arousal and dominance, and software developers’ self-assessed performance while programming. The findings show that valence and arousal are positively correlated with self-assessed productivity. This study introduces and validates a measurement instrument and a linear mixed-effects model to study the correlation of affective states and the productivity of software developers. It demonstrates the value of applying psychological tests in Software Engineering studies and echoes a call to valorize the human, individualized aspects of software developers. Lastly, it reports a body of knowledge in Psychology and Management research on the theories behind emotions, their classification, their measurements, and on the best practices to perform psychological measurements in the context of Empirical Software Engineering.