Toward a Better Understanding of How to Develop Software Under Stress – Drafting the Lines for Future Research

Abstract

Software is often produced under significant time constraints. Our idea is to understand the effects of various software development practices on the performance of developers working in stressful environments, and identify the best operating conditions for software developed under stressful conditions collecting data through questionnaires, non-invasive software measurement tools that can collect measurable data about software engineers and the software they develop, without intervening their activities, and biophysical sensors and then try to recreated also in different processes or key development practices such conditions.

A methodology for psycho-biological assessment of stress in software engineering

“…There is substantial psycho-social and medical research on stress and its measurement (Brown et al, 2018) but the transfer to software engineering has yet to be made. This is also due to the many medical, psychological, and biological ways to measure stress and on how to report the results (Noack et al, 2019) creating the need for interdisciplinary work which increases the complexity of research projects.…”

“…The software engineering body of knowledge on stress is quite small and also lacking much understanding of the phenomenon (Amin et al, 2011;Brown et al, 2018), even though there are few scattered studies that we can review.…”

“…Stress has been suggested to have detrimental effects on defect rates, team morale as well as motivation, software quality, maintainability, and requirements management (Meier et al, 2018). While short-term stress can be pushing and beneficial to software engineers, preliminary research suggests that we should find ways to reduce stress and develop tools for software development that help to reduce stress or at least are no sources of stress (Brown et al, 2018). We discussed ways to reduce stress of developers elsewhere (Ostberg et al, 2017), but without strong and validated, yet easy to adopt methodologies to detect, assess, and understand stress responses of individuals and groups of developers, it is hard to produce sound statements on the efficiency of any stress reduction approach.…”

“…We discussed ways to reduce stress of developers elsewhere (Ostberg et al, 2017), but without strong and validated, yet easy to adopt methodologies to detect, assess, and understand stress responses of individuals and groups of developers, it is hard to produce sound statements on the efficiency of any stress reduction approach. For detecting stress, research in software engineering has focused on machine learning and data mining approaches, wearable technologies (Suni Lopez, Condori-Fernández & Catala Bolos, 2018), and ad-hoc questionnaires (Meier et al, 2018) so far Brown et al (2018) have offered a review of the few scattered studies-but we still see some research gaps, which we highlight in the next section, in terms of discovered knowledge as well as the way we borrow from established research from other disciplines.…”

Peer Review #2 of "A methodology for psycho-biological assessment of stress in software engineering (v0.1)"

“…There is substantial psycho-social and medical research on stress and its measurement (e.g. Brown et al (2018)) but the transfer to software engineering has yet to be made. This is also due to the many medical, psychological, and biological ways to measure stress and on how to report the results (e.g.…”