Emotional Awareness in Software Development: Evaluating Software Project Managers’ Perspectives

Developers’ emotions significantly influence job satisfaction, motivation, productivity, and work quality throughout the software development lifecycle. Previous research highlighted the impact of human factors in various professional domains, such as decision-making, job performance, and project success. However, systematic monitoring and integration into decision-making processes within software development remain underexplored. This study investigates how software project managers approach emotional management in their projects, focusing on identifying emotional variations and their actions in response. Besides, the managers experimented with an emotional polarity-monitoring dashboard tool designed to display developers’ emotional states over time. The findings reveal that emotional variations are currently identified in an ad-hoc manner, underscoring the need for a systematic approach to monitor and manage the impact of developers’ emotional fluctuations on the development process. Software project managers recognized that a systematic approach such as the one provided by the tool used in this study would have the potential to boost productivity, team cohesion, decision-making, and institutional well-being, emphasizing the value of understanding developers’ psychological aspects to enhance the software development process.