Towards Supporting Emotion Awareness in Retrospective Meetings

Abstract

Emotion awareness is a key antecedent to team effectiveness and the use of biometrics can help software developers in gaining awareness of emotions at the individual and team level. In this paper, we propose an approach to include emotional feedback in agile retrospective meetings as a proxy to identify developers’ feelings in association with the activity performed by the team. As a proof of concept, we developed an emotion visualization tool that provides an integrated visualization of self-reported emotions, activities, and biometrics. We run a pilot study to evaluate our approach with the agile retrospective meetings of a software engineering capstone project. The preliminary findings suggest that integrated emotion visualization can be useful to inform discussion and reflection around the potential causes of unhappiness, thus triggering actionable insights that could enhance team productivity and improve collaboration.