Introduction to the special issue on affect awareness in software engineering

Affective computing has emerged in the past decade as a multidisciplinary research field concerning the detection, use, understanding, and modeling of emotions and affect in computing systems. Nowadays, affective computing is an established discipline whose methods and techniques are being applied to many application domains. This special issue reflects an emerging trend to study the role of affect in software engineering. Researchers have even created focused venues such as the International Workshop on Emotion Awareness in Software Engineering (SEmotion), at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE),1now in its third edition, and the International Workshop on Affective Computing for Requirements Engineering (AffectRE), co-located with the Requirements Engineering Conference (RE).2Affective states such as personality traits, attitudes, moods, and emotions are a crucial part of people's everyday performance at work [1]. This applies also to software development [2, 3, 4]which is also well-known as an intellectual, creative problem-solving activity. To achieve the best chance of successfully executing software engineering projects, stakeholders must demonstrate positive affect (such as trust or appreciation), agree on display rules for emotions and moods, and hold a mutual commitment to the project goals. Leveraging emotion awareness in software engineering could enhance development performance, software quality, mood regulation within a project team, and lead to fruitful interactions with all stakeholders. Software developers experience a wide range of emotions in their work [5, 6, 7]. As new technologies and requirements constantly arise, developers also should be able to adapt to flexible work conditions. Negative affective states (e.g. resentment or frustration) might become an obstacle when reacting to undesirable facts, such as negative customer feedback [8]. Similarly, moods can impact the cognitive processes involved in learning new programming languages and APIs, solving tasks with high reasoning complexity, and performing typical programming tasks [5, 4]. Finally, software engineering requires a great deal of social interaction, which leads to the widespread sharing of affective states. Awareness of the project mood [9, 10, 11] communication style [12, 13], and teammates’ responses might help developers wisely lead, manage, work together, and improve the outcomes of social activities [8]. The goal of this Special Issue is to present the opportunities and challenges of combining affective computing studies with research on human aspects in software engineering. On one hand, we aim to investigate the impact of affective states (emotions, moods, attitudes, personality traits,etc.) on individual and group performance, commitment, and collaboration in software development. On the other, we aim to foster the consideration of issues posed by exploiting affective computing as a new method for empirical software engineering. The call for papers invited high-quality research articles addressing challenges posed by affect awareness in software engineering. In this call, extended papers from SEmotion ’17, the Second International Workshop on Emotion Awareness in Software Engineering, (co-located with ICSE3) were also eligible for submission. After a careful review process in which each submission received at least three reviews, five high quality papers were accepted for publication. We congratulate the authors of the accepted papers and thank everyone who submitted a contribution to this Special Issue. We also thank the reviewers for their hard work, and the editors of the Journal of Systems and Software for accepting our Special Issue proposal and assisting us during the entire process.