Mining Valence, Arousal, and Dominance - Possibilities for Detecting Burnout and Productivity?

TL;DR

This study investigates how emotional dimensions (Valence, Arousal, Dominance) derived from issue reports can help detect burnout and productivity issues among software developers, using a large dataset of Jira comments.

Contribution

It demonstrates the potential of VAD metrics extracted from textual data to identify early signs of burnout and productivity loss in software engineering.

Findings

Issue report types vary in Valence levels.

Higher issue priority correlates with increased Arousal.

Longer resolution times are associated with higher Arousal.

Abstract

Similar to other industries, the software engineering domain is plagued by psychological diseases such as burnout, which lead developers to lose interest, exhibit lower activity and/or feel powerless. Prevention is essential for such diseases, which in turn requires early identification of symptoms. The emotional dimensions of Valence, Arousal and Dominance (VAD) are able to derive a person's interest (attraction), level of activation and perceived level of control for a particular situation from textual communication, such as emails. As an initial step towards identifying symptoms of productivity loss in software engineering, this paper explores the VAD metrics and their properties on 700,000 Jira issue reports containing over 2,000,000 comments, since issue reports keep track of a developer's progress on addressing bugs or new features. Using a general-purpose lexicon of 14,000 English words with known VAD scores, our results show that issue reports of different type (e.g., Feature Request vs. Bug) have a fair variation of Valence, while increase in issue priority (e.g., from Minor to Critical) typically increases Arousal. Furthermore, we show that as an issue's resolution time increases, so does the arousal of the individual the issue is assigned to. Finally, the resolution of an issue increases valence, especially for the issue Reporter and for quickly addressed issues. The existence of such relations between VAD and issue report activities shows promise that text mining in the future could offer an alternative way for work health assessment surveys.