Over the past decade, research has shown the affective states’ impact on work performance and team collaboration. This also applies to software engineering, which involves people in a broad range of activities in which personality, moods, and emotions play a crucial role. Software development is a mainly intellectual activity requiring creativity and problem-solving skills, which are known to be influenced by affective states.For successful software engineering projects, stakeholders need to experience positive emotions, agree on emotion display rules, and be mutually committed to the project goals. Conversely, negative affective states (such as resentment or frustration) might be an obstacle when stakeholders react to undesirable facts (for example, negative customer feedback). Such states can also impact the cognitive processes involved in learning a new language, solving tasks with high reasoning complexity, and performing the usual programming and code comprehension tasks.
Finally, software engineering involves numerous social interactions, as programmers often need to cooperate with others, whether directly or indirectly. Developers’ awareness of the project mood and of how their communication style reflects their affective state might help them become wise in teamwork, thus improving the outcome of collaborative development.
So, researchers have recently started studying the role of affective computing and affective states in software engineering. This theme issue of IEEE Software aims to share with practitioners the current trends and recent advances in research and practice and the latest tools and frameworks for supporting and enhancing emotion awareness in software development.
We invite practice-oriented papers covering any aspect of sentiment and emotion awareness in software engineering. We aim to cover a rich variety of topics, focusing on issues, challenges, methods, and practices related to the role of emotions in software development. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to,
- the impact of affective states (emotions, moods, attitudes, and personality traits) on individual and group performance;
- the role of emotions in collaborative software development;
- leveraging stakeholders’ affective feedback to improve software, tools, and processes;
- design, development, and evaluation of tools and datasets for supporting emotion awareness in software engineering;
- reusable software frameworks, APIs, and patterns for affect-aware systems;
- ethnographic approaches to affect monitoring in software development;
- mining sentiment and emotion from developers’ communication traces;
- sentiment and emotion detection from biometrics;
- methodologies and tools for large-scale emotion mining;
- emotion awareness in requirements engineering, software design, and software management;
- emotion awareness in software design philosophies, development practices, and tools;
- emotion awareness in cross-cultural teams in global software development; and
- methodologies and standards.
In addition to regular-length articles, we seek short experience reports. These reports don’t need to make a research contribution. Instead, they should present the experiences of practitioners or tool developers, sharing their practical experience and insights and focusing on the challenges faced, solutions attempted, and results obtained.
Questions?
For more information about the theme issue, contact the guest editors:
Submission Guidelines
Manuscripts must not exceed 3,000 words including figures and tables, which count for 250 words each. Submissions exceeding these limits might be rejected without refereeing. Articles deemed within the theme and scope will be peer reviewed and are subject to editing for magazine style, clarity, organization, and space. Be sure to include the name of the theme for which you’re submitting.
Articles should have a practical orientation and be written in a style accessible to practitioners. Overly complex, purely research-oriented or theoretical treatments aren’t appropriate. Articles should be novel. IEEE Software doesn’t republish material published previously in other venues, including other periodicals and formal conference or workshop proceedings, whether previous publication was in print or electronic form.
General author guidelines
For submission details: software@computer.org
To submit an article: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/sw-cs
