Visualizing emotions in software development projects

Abstract

Developers and managers need to be aware of the emotional climate of the projects they are involved to take corrective actions when necessary and to have a better understanding of the social factors affecting the project. With the growing trend of distributed teams and textual communication this type of awareness is more difficult to obtain and maintain. We propose to improve emotional climate awareness in software development projects by means of a visualization prototype which includes general and detailed views of the topics and emotions expressed in software project collaboration artifacts. We performed an initial case study in which the mailing list content of a software project was visualized. The study suggests that the length, frequency and emotion diversity of the exchanged content varies according to the project phase. However, a more extensive evaluation needs to be made.