Our paper “Stuck and Frustrated or In Flow and Happy: Sensing Developers’ Emotions and Progress” by Sebastian Müller and Thomas Fritz was accepted for ICSE 2015 and a preprint of the paper is now available.

The paper presents a study that investigates developers’ emotions and progress while working on a change task and how biometric measurements, such as heart rate or pupil sizes, can be used to assess them. In the study with 17 participants working on two change tasks each, the 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. To investigate whether we can use biometric sensors to distinguish between positive and negative emotions as well as episodes of low and high progress that developers experience during change tasks, we applied a machine learning approach to the collected data.

Over the course of the participants’ work on both change tasks we collected biometric data for a total of 213 intervals. The following figure illustrates a set of four such intervals together with the collected EDA and the heart rate signal as well as the participant’s emotion and progress ratings. Especially for the EDA signal, the example shows a visible difference between the first episode with medium progress and higher valence compared to the last episode with the developer being stuck and a lower valence.

Our analysis 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.

The preprint of the paper can be downloaded here.