Consequences of Unhappiness while Developing Software

Abstract

The growing literature on affect among software developers mostly reports on the linkage between happiness, software quality, and developer productivity. Understanding the positive side of happiness -positive emotions and moods -is an attractive and important endeavor. Scholars in industrial and organizational psychology have suggested that also studying the negative side -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, and is mainly expressed in terms of development productivity and software quality. In this paper, we attempt to uncover the experienced consequences of unhappiness among software developers. Using qualitative data analysis of the responses given by 181 questionnaire participants, we identified 49 consequences of unhappiness while doing software development. We found detrimental consequences on developers' mental well-being, the software development process, and the produced artifacts. Our classification scheme, available as open data, will spawn 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.

Programmer eXperience: A Systematic Literature Review

“…This concept is used in other studies not considered in this review and explains how the aspect of motivation has an impact on the developer performance [97]. Additionally, developer happiness and unhappiness have been studied in relation to the impact they have on programmers' work [98], [99] and [100].…”

Daily questionnaire to assess self-reported well-being during a software development project

“…Affective states have been shown to alter the productivity of software developers [8]. Effects of unhappiness while developing software include low cognitive performance, low motivation, work withdrawal, low productivity and low code quality [7].…”

Towards Recognizing the Emotions of Developers Using Biometrics: The Design of a Field Study

“…Graziotin et al [8] report about a correlation between developers' positive emotions and productivity. Conversely, unhappiness is reported to induce troubles when traying to stay focused on the problem at hand, causing drops in self-esteem and lose of motivation [9]. Emotion awareness can also be beneficial in project teams, where dynamics of encouragement (i.e., the ability to instill joy and hope among all the team members) and playfulness (i.e., the ability to create a context that encourages experimentation and tolerate errors) come into play [1].…”