Emotion Self-Monitoring in Agile Retrospectives: A Replication Study

Emotion-awareness has been recently investigated in software engineering in relation to developers’ well-being and productivity. A former study showed that self-monitoring of emotions through visualization tools combining biometric and self-reported data can enhance agile retrospective meetings, with newly formed novice student teams benefiting more than consolidated professional ones. The original authors hypothesized that the practice is most valuable for newly formed teams whose roles and collaboration dynamics are still being defined, but their sample did not include teams combining novelty with member competence and authentic project pressure. We present a partial replication in a third, intermediate context: a professional training program in which trainees form temporary teams to deliver real software products to industrial stakehold- ers. We conducted a within-subjects study with nine trainees organized in three teams over four agile sprints, comparing control and experimental conditions, and collected qualitative and quantitative data through interviews and focus groups. Our results partially support the original findings: trainees reported individual benefits in emotional awareness, but no improvements during retrospective meetings, owing to their reluctance to share emotional insights with teammates in newly formed teams. We refine the original hypothesis accordingly: emotion-monitoring tools support individual emotional self-awareness, but their team- level benefits during retrospectives appear to require a baseline of psychological safety that newly formed teams under external pressure may not yet have established.