Emotimonitor: A Trello Power-Up to Capture Emotions of Agile Teams

TL;DR

Emotimonitor is a Trello plugin that helps Agile teams track and visualize team members' emotional states through emoji reactions, aiming to understand emotional dynamics in flexible, change-prone workflows.

Contribution

We introduce Emotimonitor, a novel tool for capturing and visualizing emotions of Agile team members within Trello, facilitating emotional awareness and management.

Findings

Enables emotional expression via emoji reactions on Trello cards.

Provides visual dashboards and statistical summaries of team emotions.

Supports extensibility for diverse Agile team needs.

Abstract

In recent years, Agile methods have continued to grow into a popular means of modulating team productivity, even garnering a presence in non-software development related industries. The uptake of Agile methods has been driven by their flexibility, making them more suitable for many teams when compared to traditional approaches. However, an inevitable expectation for an Agile workflow is a higher level of change and uncertainty regarding requirements and tasks, which can ultimately have impacts on team member emotional states. The extent of such emotion impacts has motivated our research into the manner in which emotional states evolve in an Agile setting, along with whether such emotions can be accurately measured. To this end, we have developed Emotimonitor, a Trello power-up designed to capture information on emotions of team members as they relate to their technical tasks through a user-friendly interface. Emotimonitor will better enable team members to express their emotional states through emoji reactions on Trello cards, while also providing team leaders with a dashboard summarising these reactions as visualisations and statistical data. It is extensible and potentially provides an outlet for team members operating in Agile environments to better express their emotional states.