What happens when software developers are (un)happy

Under a Creative Commons license

Open access

Highlights

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Consequences of happiness and unhappiness among software developers detailed.
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More positive consequences of happiness are experienced related to the self.
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More negative consequences of unhappiness are experienced for external factors.
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Results based on qualitative analysis of more than 300 developers’ experiences.
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Category scheme of consequences usable for further studies and as guidelines.

Abstract

The growing literature on affect among software developers mostly reports on the linkage between happiness, software quality, and developer productivity. Understanding happiness and unhappiness in all its components – positive and negative emotions and moods – is an attractive and important endeavor. Scholars in industrial and organizational psychology have suggested that understanding happiness and unhappiness could lead to cost-effective ways of enhancing working conditions, job performance, and to limiting the occurrence of psychological disorders. Our comprehension of the consequences of (un)happiness among developers is still too shallow, being mainly expressed in terms of development productivity and software quality. In this paper, we study what happens when developers are happy and unhappy while developing software. Qualitative data analysis of responses given by 317 questionnaire participants identified 42 consequences of unhappiness and 32 of happiness. We found consequences of happiness and unhappiness that are beneficial and detrimental for developers’ mental well-being, the software development process, and the produced artifacts. Our classification scheme, available as open data enables new happiness research opportunities of cause-effect type, and it can act as a guideline for practitioners for identifying damaging effects of unhappiness and for fostering happiness on the job.

Keywords

Behavioral software engineering

Developer experience

Human aspects

Happiness

Affect

Emotion

Cited by (0)

Daniel Graziotin is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. His research interests include human, behavioral, and psychological aspects of empirical software engineering, studies of science, and open science. He is associate editor at the Journal of Open Research Software and academic editor at the Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) journal. Daniel was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for postdoctoral researchers in 2017, the European Design Award (bronze) in 2016, and the Data Journalism Award in 2015. He received his PhD in computer science at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy.

Fabian Fagerholm is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland and senior lecturer at Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden. His research interests include developer experience, human, behavioral, and psychological aspects of software engineering, continuous experimentation and evidence-driven software product development, open source software development, and experiential and project-based software engineering education. He received his PhD in computer science from the University of Helsinki, Finland.

Xiaofeng Wang is a researcher at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy. Her research interests include software startups, software engineering in startup contexts, agile and lean software development, human factors in software engineering, creativity and innovation, and social media usage in software development. She received her Ph.D. in Information Systems from the University of Bath, UK.

Pekka Abrahamsson is professor of Information Systems at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Prior to his current position he was a full professor at NTNU in Norway, dean and full professor at Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy and in University of Helsinki. His research interests are centered on empirical software engineering, agile development and more recently on software startups. He is the recipient of the Nokia Foundation Award in 2007 for his achievements in software research. He leads also the SSRN, the global network of software startup researchers. He received his Ph.D. on Software Engineering from University of Oulu.