Self-monitoring of Developers’ Emotions: the Case of Agile Retrospective Meetings

Developers experience a wide range of emotions while creating software. Being able to identify the causes of one’s own and peers’ emotions can equip developers with the ability to regulate their behavior to restore positive moods and productivity. In this paper, we investigate to what extent self-monitoring of emotions can enhance agile retrospective meetings by improving the emotion awareness of participants. To this aim, we conducted a controlled experiment involving three software development teams involving two student teams and one professional developers team. The experiment design involves the collection of biometrics and self-reported information about emotions, which are then visualized before the retrospective meetings to inform discussion using EmoVizPhy, a tool that we designed and implemented for this aim. While students found that self-monitoring helped them recall significant emotional episodes, leading to more meaningful contributions during retrospectives, professional developers perceived limited benefits from this practice. Furthermore, based on the analysis of corrective actions identified by the participants during the study, we hypothesize that self-monitoring of emotions through EmoVizPhy may play a valuable role in facilitating the consolidation of new agile teams for which roles and collaboration dynamics are still being defined.