Are Happy Developers more Productive? The Correlation of Affective States of Software Developers and their self-assessed Productivity

TL;DR

This study empirically investigates how developers' emotional states influence their self-assessed productivity, emphasizing the importance of human factors and psychometric methods in software engineering research.

Contribution

It introduces and validates a measurement instrument and a linear mixed-effects model to analyze the correlation between affective states and developer productivity.

Findings

Two affective states are positively correlated with self-assessed productivity.

Psychometric tools are valuable for human-centered software engineering studies.

The study highlights the importance of individual emotional factors in developer performance.

Abstract

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.