On the Unhappiness of Software Developers

The happy-productive worker thesis states that happy workers are more productive. Recent research in software engineering supports the thesis, and the ideal of flourishing happiness among software developers is often expressed among industry practitioners. However, the literature suggests that a cost-effective way to foster happiness and productivity among workers could be to limit unhappiness. Psychological disorders such as job burnout and anxiety could also be reduced by limiting the negative experiences of software developers. Simultaneously, a baseline assessment of (un)happiness and knowledge about how developers experience it are missing. In this paper, we broaden the understanding of unhappiness among software developers in terms of (1) the software developer population distribution of (un)happiness, and (2) the causes of unhappiness while developing software. We conducted a large-scale quantitative and qualitative survey, incorporating a psychometrically validated instrument for measuring (un)happiness, with 2 220 developers, yielding a rich and balanced sample of 1318 complete responses. Our results indicate that software developers are a slightly happy population, but the need for limiting the unhappiness of developers remains. We also identified 219 factors representing causes of unhappiness while developing software. Our results, which are available as open data, can act as guidelines for practitioners in management positions and developers in general for fostering happiness on the job. We suggest considering happiness in future studies of both human and technical aspects in software engineering.

[1]  Yong Wang,et al.  The Scale of Positive and Negative Experience (SPANE): Psychometric Properties and Normative Data in a Large Chinese Sample , 2013, PloS one.

[2]  Daniel M. Haybron.  On Being Happy or Unhappy1 , 2005 .

[3]  R Core Team,et al.  R: A language and environment for statistical computing. , 2014 .

[4]  Emerson R. Murphy-Hill,et al.  Gender bias in open source: Pull request acceptance of women versus men , 2016, PeerJ Prepr..

[5]  António Caetano,et al.  Validation of the Flourishing Scale and Scale of Positive and Negative Experience in Portugal , 2011, Social Indicators Research.

[6]  Guadalupe Molinari,et al.  Assessing positive and negative experiences: validation of a new measure of well-being in an Italian population. , 2016, Rivista di psichiatria.

[7]  Lee Sigelaman.  Question-Order Effects on Presidential Popularity , 1981 .

[8]  Veljko Jovanović,et al.  Beyond the PANAS: Incremental validity of the Scale of Positive and Negative Experience (SPANE) in relation to well-being , 2015 .

[9]  Cynthia D. Fisher,et al.  Mood and emotions while working: missing pieces of job satisfaction? , 2000 .

[10]  Katsunori Sumi,et al.  Reliability and Validity of Japanese Versions of the Flourishing Scale and the Scale of Positive and Negative Experience , 2013, Social Indicators Research.

[11]  L. Giddings.  Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches, 2d ed , 2005 .

[12]  Pekka Abrahamsson,et al.  How do you feel, developer? An explanatory theory of the impact of affects on programming performance , 2015, PeerJ Comput. Sci..

[13]  B. Fredrickson.  The role of positive emotions in positive psychology. The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. , 2001, The American psychologist.

[14]  Pekka Abrahamsson,et al.  Consequences of Unhappiness while Developing Software , 2017, 2017 IEEE/ACM 2nd International Workshop on Emotion Awareness in Software Engineering (SEmotion).

[15]  Mika Mäntylä,et al.  Mining Valence, Arousal, and Dominance - Possibilities for Detecting Burnout and Productivity? , 2016, 2016 IEEE/ACM 13th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR).

[16]  A. Furnham.  Response bias, social desirability and dissimulation , 1986 .

[17]  Philip J. Guo,et al.  Paradise unplugged: identifying barriers for female participation on stack overflow , 2016, SIGSOFT FSE.

[18]  D. Watson,et al.  Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: the PANAS scales. , 1988, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[19]  H. Russell Bernard,et al.  Social Research Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches , 2000 .

[20]  H. Kraemer,et al.  The role and interpretation of pilot studies in clinical research. , 2011, Journal of psychiatric research.

[21]  Jan Zabojnik,et al.  Work-related perks, agency problems, and optimal incentive contracts , 2008 .

[22]  Pekka Abrahamsson,et al.  Online appendix: the happiness of software developers , 2017 .

[23]  Richard E. Lucas,et al.  Subjective Weil-Being: Three Decades of Progress , 2004 .

[24]  Pekka Abrahamsson,et al.  The Affect of Software Developers: Common Misconceptions and Measurements , 2015, 2015 IEEE/ACM 8th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering.

[25]  J. Russell.  Core affect and the psychological construction of emotion. , 2003, Psychological review.

[26]  Taro Yamane.  Statistics: An Introductory Analysis , 1965 .

[27]  Pekka Abrahamsson,et al.  Software Developers, Moods, Emotions, and Performance , 2014, IEEE Software.

[28]  Emerson Murphy-Hill,et al.  Gender differences and bias in open source: pull request acceptance of women versus men , 2017, PeerJ Comput. Sci..

[29]  Leon Sterling,et al.  Emotion-led modelling for people-oriented requirements engineering: The case study of emergency systems , 2015, J. Syst. Softw..

[30]  Thomas Fritz,et al.  Stuck and Frustrated or in Flow and Happy: Sensing Developers' Emotions and Progress , 2015, 2015 IEEE/ACM 37th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering.

[31]  FeldtRobert,et al.  Behavioral software engineering , 2015 .

[32]  Anselm L. Strauss,et al.  Basics of qualitative research : techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory , 1998 .

[33]  Michele Marchesi,et al.  Are Bullies More Productive? Empirical Study of Affectiveness vs. Issue Fixing Time , 2015, 2015 IEEE/ACM 12th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories.

[34]  Steven A. Murphy,et al.  The Happy-Productive Worker Thesis Revisited , 2008 .

[35]  Thomas Fritz,et al.  Determining relevancy: how software developers determine relevant information in feeds , 2011, CHI.

[36]  E. Thompson.  Development and Validation of an Internationally Reliable Short-Form of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) , 2007 .

[37]  Georgios Gousios,et al.  Work practices and challenges in pull-based development: the contributor's perspective , 2015, ICSE.

[38]  James E. Bartlett,et al.  Organizational research: Determining appropriate sample size in survey research , 2001 .

[39]  Michele Marchesi,et al.  How diverse is your team? Investigating gender and nationality diversity in GitHub teams , 2017, Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development.

[40]  รศ.ดร.ธีรศักดิ์ อุ่นอารมย์เลิศ,et al.  Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Method Approaches , 2016 .

[41]  Michele Marchesi,et al.  Software development: do good manners matter? , 2016, PeerJ Comput. Sci..

[42]  Munmun De Choudhury,et al.  Understanding affect in the workplace via social media , 2013, CSCW.

[43]  Daniel M. Haybron.  Happiness and Pleasure , 2001 .

[44]  Pekka Abrahamsson,et al.  Happy software developers solve problems better: psychological measurements in empirical software engineering , 2014, PeerJ.

[45]  Pekka Abrahamsson,et al.  Understanding the affect of developers: theoretical background and guidelines for psychoempirical software engineering , 2015, SSE@SIGSOFT FSE.

[46]  Juliet M. Corbin,et al.  Basics of Qualitative Research (3rd ed.): Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory , 2008 .

[47]  Graham A du Plessis,et al.  Validation of the Scale of Positive and Negative Experience in a South African student sample , 2017 .

[48]  Fabian Fagerholm,et al.  Software Developer Experience: Case Studies in Lean-Agile and Open Source Environments , 2015 .

[49]  Brian Knutson,et al.  Cultural variation in affect valuation. , 2006, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[50]  G. Laudel,et al.  Life With and Without Coding: Two Methods for Early-Stage Data Analysis in Qualitative Research Aiming at Causal Explanations , 2013 .

[51]  Pekka Abrahamsson,et al.  Do feelings matter? On the correlation of affects and the self‐assessed productivity in software engineering , 2014, J. Softw. Evol. Process..

[52]  Bill Curtis,et al.  A field study of the software design process for large systems , 1988, CACM.

[53]  Daniela E. Damian,et al.  Selecting Empirical Methods for Software Engineering Research , 2008, Guide to Advanced Empirical Software Engineering.

[54]  John W. Creswell,et al.  Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches , 2010 .

[55]  Jürgen Münch,et al.  How do software developers experience team performance in lean and agile environments? , 2014, EASE '14.

[56]  Robert P. Vecchio,et al.  Negative Emotion in the Workplace: Employee Jealousy and Envy , 2000 .

[57]  Chris Parnin,et al.  Exploring Causes of Frustration for Software Developers , 2015, 2015 IEEE/ACM 8th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering.

[58]  Watts S. Humphrey,et al.  Managing Technical People: Innovation, Teamwork, and the Software Process , 1996 .

[59]  S. Lyubomirsky,et al.  The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success? , 2005, Psychological bulletin.

[60]  Ali E. Akgün,et al.  Antecedents and Results of Emotional Capability in Software Development Project Teams , 2011 .

[61]  Rakesh Rana,et al.  On the role of cross-disciplinary research and SSE in addressing the challenges of the digitalization of society , 2015, 2015 6th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering and Service Science (ICSESS).

[62]  H. Ahmad.,et al.  Determining Sample Size for Research Activities , 2017 .

[63]  A. Winsor.  Sampling techniques. , 2000, Nursing times.

[64]  Pearl Brereton,et al.  Robust Statistical Methods for Empirical Software Engineering , 2017, Empirical Software Engineering.

[65]  Daniel Graziotin,et al.  Software quality information needs , 2016 .

[66]  Pekka Abrahamsson,et al.  Performance Alignment Work: How software developers experience the continuous adaptation of team performance in Lean and Agile environments , 2015, Inf. Softw. Technol..

[67]  Robert M. Hierons,et al.  Do moods affect programmers’ debug performance? , 2011, Cognition, Technology & Work.

[68]  Barry Loewer,et al.  On Being Happy or Unhappy , 2018 .

[69]  Michal R. Wróbel,et al.  Emotions in the software development process , 2013, 2013 6th International Conference on Human System Interactions (HSI).

[70]  Chu Kim-prieto,et al.  New Well-being Measures: Short Scales to Assess Flourishing and Positive and Negative Feelings , 2010 .