Sensing Developers’ Emotions: The Design of a Replicated Experiment

Software developers experience a wide variety of emotions during their work and research is now focusing on the role played by these emotions on software developers productivity as well as on their wellbeing. In this paper, we propose a replication of a study aimed investigating to what extent biometric sensors can be used to automatically detect developers’ emotions during programming tasks. The long-term goal of our research is to discover which emotions affect developers’ productivity and wellbeing during their work. Specifically, we aim at defining approaches for early detection of negative affective states that are known to impair mental wellbeing and productivity.