Emotional Dashboard: a Non-Intrusive Approach to Monitor Software Developers' Emotions and Personality Traits

Abstract

Developers' emotions are crucial elements that influence the overall job satisfaction of software engineers, including motivation, productivity, and quality of the work, affecting the software development lifecycle. Existing approaches to assess and monitor developers' emotions, such as facial expressions, self-assessed surveys, and biometric sensors, imply considerable intrusiveness on developers' routines and tend to be used only during limited periods. This paper proposes a new non-intrusive and automatable tool (Emotional Dashboard) to assess, monitor, and visualize software developers' emotions during long periods, providing team leaders and project managers with an overview of teams' and software developers' emotional statuses. The idea is to use posts shared by developers on social media to assess their emotions' polarity and visualize the emotional situation on a dashboard, allowing the identification of potentially abnormal emotional periods that may affect the software development. A first evaluation of the tool’s accuracy, done by comparing the emotion polarity (negative, positive, or neutral) of posts done by our tool with the manual classification of a set of posts done by three psychologists, has shown an accuracy of 77%. The tool is available for analysis at this link: https://emotional-dashboard.herokuapp.com.