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Daniel Graziotin

Publications and source records attributed to Daniel Graziotin.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources
arXiv2017

Towards the Assessment of Stress and Emotional Responses of a Salutogenesis-Enhanced Software Tool Using Psychophysiological Measurements

Software development is intellectual, based on collaboration, and performed in a highly demanding economic market. As such, it is dominated by time pressure, stress, and emotional trauma. While studies of affect are emerging and rising in software engineering research, stress has yet to find its place in the literature despite that it is highly related to affect. In this paper, we study stress coping with the affect-laden framework of Salutogenesis, which is a validated psychological framework for enhancing mental health through a feeling of coherence. We propose a controlled experiment for testing our hypotheses that a static analysis tool enhanced with the Salutogenesis model will bring 1) a higher number of fixed quality issues, 2) reduced cognitive load, 3) reduction of the overall stress, and 4) positive affect induction effects to developers. The experiment will make use of validated physiological measurements of stress as proxied by cortisol and alpha-amylase levels in saliva samples, a psychometrically validated measurement of mood and affect disposition, and stress inductors such as a cognitive load task. Our hypotheses, if empirically supported, will lead to the creation of environments, methods, and tools that alleviate stress among developers while enhancing affect on the job and task performance.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2017

Unhappy Developers: Bad for Themselves, Bad for Process, and Bad for Software Product

Recent research in software engineering supports the "happy-productive" thesis, and the desire of flourishing happiness among programmers is often expressed by industry practitioners. Recent literature has suggested that a cost-effective way to foster happiness and productivity among workers could be to limit unhappiness of developers due to its negative impact. However, possible negative effects of unhappiness are still largely unknown in the software development context. In this paper, we present the first results from a study exploring the consequences of the unhappy developers. Using qualitative data analysis of the survey responses given by 181 participants, we identified 49 potential consequences of unhappiness while developing software. These results have several implications. While raising the awareness of the role of moods, emotions and feelings in software development, we foresee that our classification scheme will spawn new happiness studies linking causes and effects, and it can act as a guideline for developers and managers to foster happiness at work.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2016

The Scalability-Efficiency/Maintainability-Portability Trade-off in Simulation Software Engineering: Examples and a Preliminary Systematic Literature Review

Large-scale simulations play a central role in science and the industry. Several challenges occur when building simulation software, because simulations require complex software developed in a dynamic construction process. That is why simulation software engineering (SSE) is emerging lately as a research focus. The dichotomous trade-off between scalability and efficiency (SE) on the one hand and maintainability and portability (MP) on the other hand is one of the core challenges. We report on the SE/MP trade-off in the context of an ongoing systematic literature review (SLR). After characterizing the issue of the SE/MP trade-off using two examples from our own research, we (1) review the 33 identified articles that assess the trade-off, (2) summarize the proposed solutions for the trade-off, and (3) discuss the findings for SSE and future work. Overall, we see evidence for the SE/MP trade-off and first solution approaches. However, a strong empirical foundation has yet to be established; general quantitative metrics and methods supporting software developers in addressing the trade-off have to be developed. We foresee considerable future work in SSE across scientific communities.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2016

Mining Valence, Arousal, and Dominance - Possibilities for Detecting Burnout and Productivity?

Similar to other industries, the software engineering domain is plagued by psychological diseases such as burnout, which lead developers to lose interest, exhibit lower activity and/or feel powerless. Prevention is essential for such diseases, which in turn requires early identification of symptoms. The emotional dimensions of Valence, Arousal and Dominance (VAD) are able to derive a person's interest (attraction), level of activation and perceived level of control for a particular situation from textual communication, such as emails. As an initial step towards identifying symptoms of productivity loss in software engineering, this paper explores the VAD metrics and their properties on 700,000 Jira issue reports containing over 2,000,000 comments, since issue reports keep track of a developer's progress on addressing bugs or new features. Using a general-purpose lexicon of 14,000 English words with known VAD scores, our results show that issue reports of different type (e.g., Feature Request vs. Bug) have a fair variation of Valence, while increase in issue priority (e.g., from Minor to Critical) typically increases Arousal. Furthermore, we show that as an issue's resolution time increases, so does the arousal of the individual the issue is assigned to. Finally, the resolution of an issue increases valence, especially for the issue Reporter and for quickly addressed issues. The existence of such relations between VAD and issue report activities shows promise that text mining in the future could offer an alternative way for work health assessment surveys.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2016

Towards a Theory of Affect and Software Developers' Performance

For more than thirty years, it has been claimed that a way to improve software developers' productivity and software quality is to focus on people. The underlying assumption seems to be that "happy and satisfied software developers perform better". More specifically, affects-emotions and moods-have an impact on cognitive activities and the working performance of individuals. Development tasks are undertaken heavily through cognitive processes, yet software engineering research (SE) lacks theory on affects and their impact on software development activities. This PhD dissertation supports the advocates of studying the human and social aspects of SE and the psychology of programming. This dissertation aims to theorize on the link between affects and software development performance. A mixed method approach was employed, which comprises studies of the literature in psychology and SE, quantitative experiments, and a qualitative study, for constructing a multifaceted theory of the link between affects and programming performance. The theory explicates the linkage between affects and analytical problem-solving performance of developers, their software development task productivity, and the process behind the linkage. The results are novel in the domains of SE and psychology, and they fill an important lack that had been raised by both previous research and by practitioners. The implications of this PhD lie in setting out the basic building blocks for researching and understanding the affect of software developers, and how it is related to software development performance. Overall, the evidence hints that happy software developers perform better in analytic problem solving, are more productive while developing software, are prone to share their feelings in order to let researchers and managers understand them, and are susceptible to interventions for enhancing their affects on the job.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2015

Understanding the Affect of Developers: Theoretical Background and Guidelines for Psychoempirical Software Engineering

Affects---emotions and moods---have an impact on cognitive processing activities and the working performance of individuals. It has been established that software development tasks are undertaken through cognitive processing activities. Therefore, we have proposed to employ psychology theory and measurements in software engineering (SE) research. We have called it "psychoempirical software engineering". However, we found out that existing SE research has often fallen into misconceptions about the affect of developers, lacking in background theory and how to successfully employ psychological measurements in studies. The contribution of this paper is threefold. (1) It highlights the challenges to conduct proper affect-related studies with psychology; (2) it provides a comprehensive literature review in affect theory; and (3) it proposes guidelines for conducting psychoempirical software engineering.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2015

How Do You Feel, Developer? An Explanatory Theory of the Impact of Affects on Programming Performance

Affects---emotions and moods---have an impact on cognitive activities and the working performance of individuals. Development tasks are undertaken through cognitive processes, yet software engineering research lacks theory on affects and their impact on software development activities. In this paper, we report on an interpretive study aimed at broadening our understanding of the psychology of programming in terms of the experience of affects while programming, and the impact of affects on programming performance. We conducted a qualitative interpretive study based on: face-to-face open-ended interviews, in-field observations, and e-mail exchanges. This enabled us to construct a novel explanatory theory of the impact of affects on development performance. The theory is explicated using an established taxonomy framework. The proposed theory builds upon the concepts of events, affects, attractors, focus, goals, and performance. Theoretical and practical implications are given.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2015

In Need of Creative Mobile Service Ideas? Forget Adults and Ask Young Children

It is well acknowledged that innovation is a key success factor in mobile service domain. Having creative ideas is the first critical step in the innovation process. Many studies suggest that customers are a valuable source of creative ideas. However, the literature also shows that adults may be constrained by existing technology frames, which are known to hinder creativity. Instead young children (aged 7-12) are considered digital natives yet are free from existing technology frames. This led us to study them as a potential source for creative mobile service ideas. A set of 41,000 mobile ideas obtained from a research project in 2006 granted us a unique opportunity to study the mobile service ideas from young children. We randomly selected two samples of ideas (N=400 each), one contained the ideas from young children, the other from adults (aged 17-50). These ideas were evaluated by several evaluators using an existing creativity framework. The results show that the mobile service ideas from the young children are significantly more original, transformational, implementable, and relevant than those from the adults. Therefore, this study shows that young children are better sources of novel and quality ideas than adults in the mobile services domain. This study bears significant contributions to the creativity and innovation research. It also indicates a new and valuable source for the companies that seek for creative ideas for innovative products and services.

cs.CY↗
arXiv2015

The Affect of Software Developers: Common Misconceptions and Measurements

The study of affects (i.e., emotions, moods) in the workplace has received a lot of attention in the last 15 years. Despite the fact that software development has been shown to be intellectual, creative, and driven by cognitive activities, and that affects have a deep influence on cognitive activities, software engineering research lacks an understanding of the affects of software developers. This note provides (1) common misconceptions of affects when dealing with job satisfaction, motivation, commitment, well-being, and happiness; (2) validated measurement instruments for affect measurement; and (3) our recommendations when measuring the affects of software developers.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2015

Green open access in computer science - an exploratory study on author-based self-archiving awareness, practice, and inhibitors

Access to the work of others is something that is too often taken for granted, yet problematic and difficult to be obtained unless someone pays for it. Green and gold open access are claimed to be a solution to this problem. While open access is gaining momentum in some fields, there is a limited and seasoned knowledge about self-archiving in computer science. In particular, there is an inadequate understanding of author-based self-archiving awareness, practice, and inhibitors. This article reports an exploratory study of the awareness of self-archiving, the practice of self-archiving, and the inhibitors of self-archiving among authors in an Italian computer science faculty. Forty-nine individuals among interns, PhD students, researchers, and professors were recruited in a questionnaire (response rate of 72.8%). The quantitative and qualitative responses suggested that there is still work needed in terms of advocating green open access to computer science authors who seldom self-archive and when they do, they often infringe the copyright transfer agreements (CTAs) of the publishers. In addition, tools from the open-source community are needed to facilitate author-based self-archiving, which should comprise of an automatic check of the CTAs. The study identified nine factors inhibiting the act of self-archiving among computer scientists. As a first step, this study proposes several propositions regarding author-based self-archiving in computer science that can be further investigated. Recommendations to foster self-archiving in computer science, based on the results, are provided.

cs.DL↗
arXiv2015

Happy software developers solve problems better: psychological measurements in empirical software engineering

For more than 30 years, it has been claimed that a way to improve software developers' productivity and software quality is to focus on people and to provide incentives to make developers satisfied and happy. This claim has rarely been verified in software engineering research, which faces an additional challenge in comparison to more traditional engineering fields: software development is an intellectual activity and is dominated by often-neglected human aspects. Among the skills required for software development, developers must possess high analytical problem-solving skills and creativity for the software construction process. According to psychology research, affects-emotions and moods-deeply influence the cognitive processing abilities and performance of workers, including creativity and analytical problem solving. Nonetheless, little research has investigated the correlation between the affective states, creativity, and analytical problem-solving performance of programmers. This article echoes the call to employ psychological measurements in software engineering research. We report a study with 42 participants to investigate the relationship between the affective states, creativity, and analytical problem-solving skills of software developers. The results offer support for the claim that happy developers are indeed better problem solvers in terms of their analytical abilities. The following contributions are made by this study: (1) providing a better understanding of the impact of affective states on the creativity and analytical problem-solving capacities of developers, (2) introducing and validating psychological measurements, theories, and concepts of affective states, creativity, and analytical-problem-solving skills in empirical software engineering, and (3) raising the need for studying the human factors of software engineering by employing a multidisciplinary viewpoint.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2014

Do feelings matter? On the correlation of affects and the self-assessed productivity in software engineering

Background: software engineering research (SE) lacks theory and methodologies for addressing human aspects in software development. Development tasks are undertaken through cognitive processing activities. Affects (emotions, moods, feelings) have a linkage to cognitive processing activities and the productivity of individuals. SE research needs to incorporate affect measurements to valorize human factors and to enhance management styles. Objective: analyze the affects dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance of software developers and their real-time correlation with their self-assessed productivity (sPR). Method: repeated measurements design with 8 participants (4 students, 4 professionals), conveniently sampled and studied individually over 90 minutes of programming. The analysis was performed by fitting a linear mixed- effects (LME) model. Results: valence and dominance are positively correlated with the sPR. The model was able to express about 38% of deviance from the sPR. Many lessons were learned when employing psychological measurements in SE and for fitting LME. Conclusion: this article demonstrates the value of applying psychological tests in SE and echoes a call to valorize the human, individualized aspects of software developers. It reports a body of knowledge about affects, their classification, their measurement, and the best practices to perform psychological measurements in SE with LME models.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2014

A framework for systematic analysis of Open Access journals and its application in software engineering and information systems

This article is a contribution towards an understanding of Open Access (OA) publishing. It proposes an analysis framework of 18 core attributes, divided into the areas of Bibliographic information, Activity metrics, Economics, Accessibility, and Predatory issues of OA journals. The framework has been employed in a systematic analysis of 30 OA journals in software engineering (SE) and information systems (IS), which were selected among 386 OA journals in Computer Science from the Directory of OA Journals. An analysis is performed on the sample of the journals, to provide an overview of the current situation of OA journals in the fields of SE and IS. The journals are then compared between-group, according to the presence of a publication fee. A within-group analysis is performed on the journals requesting publication charges to authors, in order to understand what is the value added according to different price ranges. This article offers several contributions. It presents an overview of OA definitions and models. It provides an analysis framework born from the observation of data and the literature. It raises the need to study OA in the fields of SE and IS while offering a first analysis. Finally, it provides recommendations to readers of OA journals. This paper highlights several concerns still threatening OA publishing in the fields of SE and IS. Among them, it is shown that high publication fees are not sufficiently justified by the publishers, which often lack transparency and may prevent authors from adopting OA.

cs.DL↗
arXiv2013

Traverse the landscape of the mind by walking: an exploration of a new brainstorming practice

Group brainstorming is a well-known idea generation technique, which plays a key role in software development processes. Despite this, the relevant literature has had little to offer in advancing our understanding of the effectiveness of group brainstorming sessions. In this paper we present a research-in-progress on brainstorming while walking, which is a practice built upon the relationship between thinking and walking. The objective is to better understand how to conduct group brainstorming effectively. We compared two brainstorming sessions, one performed during a mountain walk, the other traditionally in a room. Three preliminary findings are obtained: walking can lead to an effective idea generation session; brainstorming while walking can encourage team members to participate in and contribute to the session in an equal manner; and it can help a team to maintain sustainable mental energy. Our study opens up an avenue for future exploration of effective group brainstorming practices.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2013

A Web-based modeling tool for the SEMAT Essence theory of Software Engineering

As opposed to more mature subjects, software engineering lacks general theories to establish its foundations as a discipline. The Essence Theory of software engineering (Essence) has been proposed by the Software Engineering Methods and Theory (SEMAT) initiative. Essence goal is to develop a theoretically sound basis for software engineering practice and its wide adoption. Essence is yet far from reaching academic and industry adoption. Reasons include a struggle to foresee its utilization potential and the lack of tools implementing it. SEMAT Accelerator (SematAcc) is a Web-positioning tool for a software engineering endeavor, which implements the SEMAT's Essence kernel. SematAcc allows using Essence, thus helping to understand it. The tool enables teaching, adopting, and researching Essence in controlled experiments and case studies.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2013

Making Sense out of a Jungle of JavaScript Frameworks: towards a Practitioner-friendly Comparative Analysis

The field of Web development is entering the HTML5 and CSS3 era and JavaScript is becoming increasingly influential. A large number of JavaScript frameworks have been recently promoted. Practitioners applying the latest technologies need to choose a suitable JavaScript framework (JSF) in order to abstract the frustrating and complicated coding steps and to provide a cross-browser compatibility. Apart from benchmark suites and recommendation from experts, there is little research helping practitioners to select the most suitable JSF to a given situation. The few proposals employ software metrics on the JSF, but practitioners are driven by different concerns when choosing a JSF. As an answer to the critical needs, this paper is a call for action. It proposes a re-search design towards a comparative analysis framework of JSF, which merges researcher needs and practitioner needs.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2013

Are Happy Developers more Productive? The Correlation of Affective States of Software Developers and their self-assessed Productivity

For decades now, it has been claimed that a way to improve software developers' productivity is to focus on people. Indeed, while human factors have been recognized in Software Engineering research, few empirical investigations have attempted to verify the claim. Development tasks are undertaken through cognitive processing abilities. Affective states - emotions, moods, and feelings - have an impact on work-related behaviors, cognitive processing activities, and the productivity of individuals. In this paper, we report an empirical study on the impact of affective states on software developers' performance while programming. Two affective states dimensions are positively correlated with self-assessed productivity. We demonstrate the value of applying psychometrics in Software Engineering studies and echo a call to valorize the human, individualized aspects of software developers. We introduce and validate a measurement instrument and a linear mixed-effects model to study the correlation of affective states and the productivity of software developers.

cs.SE↗