Toward a Model of Emotion Influences on Agile Decision Making

This position paper describes an approach to create a framework for modeling affect in decision making for agile processes, and a procedure to test its use by applying it to the introduction of Multi Criteria Decision Methods, and in particular the Best Worst Method, into agile development. We believe that affect changes development in a significant way especially for agile development, which requires close collaboration. We postulate that the structuring of a decision will engage a larger audience eliciting full participation by actors like the customer who are not necessarily accustomed to a development environment. Further, we believe that the structuring of the decision process and the involvement of a larger pool of actors will reduce negative affect, thus enabling a faster, better empowering set of decisions that ultimately will result in higher quality software products and a lower development time.