Preliminary findings on tools for the analysis of mental activity of programmers using EEG data from portable devices

Abstract

Developers are indeed the most important resource in software production, and the individual developers are hard to substitute. The core of the work of the developers of knowledge intensive systems is in their mind, and this now a growing interest in understanding how to detect and model the state of their mind. Such analysis would enable to determine and model the optimal situation to develop in terms, for instance, of speed of development, minimization of errors, etc., and, to the extent possible, to recreate or to get close to such situation while organizing the work, the processes, the tools, and so on. The problem of performing such analysis is that the most refined equipment to model the work of the mind, like the fMRI, is very expensive and not movable. However, a tool, MNE, has been developed who is able to recreate accurate approximations using EEG of the data coming from an accurate wearable device that would come from the fMRI. This is a major enabler of the research in this area and in this paper details on why to select it and how to use it are provided. Current paper makes proof-of-concept to show that EEG is applicable for for retrieving information about functional state of the brain especially with a help of MNE tool.