The Role of Affect in Decision Making for Agile Processes

软件生产变得越来越复杂。到2017年底，全球IT支出预计将增长到近3.5万亿美元。软件开发项目现在通常可以与大型制造项目相比较，并且具有可比较的预算。在过去的十年中，敏捷过程已经被开发出来，以解决软件开发的无形本质，即以更迭代的方式创建软件，一次一个部分，并以客户需求为指导。今天的行业声称在其开发工作的很大一部分中使用了敏捷过程，或者其中的一部分。人类处于这种创造性工作的中心，因此情感和情绪可能会影响重要的决策，例如需求优先级、架构和设计选择，以及实现策略。做出具有挑战性的决定可能会导致团队成员之间的冲突，其后果可能会阻碍甚至阻止项目的成功完成。然而，这些冲突对软件开发的影响至今几乎没有被考虑到。我们建议建立一个软件生产的情感模型，并测试情感和情绪是否以系统的方式影响软件开发，以及影响程度。我们将通过在工业界进行严格的研究来做到这一点。选定的行业合作伙伴包括大型组织（IBM和Siemens）和中小型企业（EduCode、Serenova和BlueSpurs）。这些研究将依赖于定量和定性措施，以确保我们以尽可能全面的方式捕捉到情感的贡献。我们的结果，无论是积极的还是消极的，都将为软件开发的人类方面带来新的曙光，这在传统上是非常难以界定的。在这些研究中获得的专业知识将直接涉及77多名研究生，并通过指导课程和参与研究生和本科生的研究，在五年内使1100多名学生受益。此外，如果结果需要行业合作伙伴的进一步参与，我们将创建一个卓越的研究中心，研究成果可以作为技术（工具）和专门的指导（方法）转移到行业。最后，我们的研究结果将发表在会议、期刊、书籍章节和书籍上；研究数据将在大学的开放获取档案中提供。这对于指导未来的研究人员在软件开发的新发现路径上至关重要，如果被全球工业的很小一部分采用，就有可能提供数十亿美元的收益。

Software production has become increasingly more complex. Global spending on IT will foreseeably grow to nearly 3.5 trillion US dollars by the end of 2017. Software development projects are now often comparable to large manufacturing projects and have comparable budgets. In the last decade, agile processes have been developed to address the intangible nature of software development that creates software in a more iterative fashion, one piece at a time, and is guided by customer needs. Industry today claims to use agile processes, or parts thereof, for a sizeable part of their development efforts. Human beings are at the centre of this creative effort, and thus emotions and moods may affect important decisions such as requirement prioritization, architectural and design choices, and implementation strategies. Making a challenging decision can result in conflict among team members, with consequences that may hamper or even prevent a project's successful completion. Yet, the influence of these conflicts on software development has hardly been considered to date.We propose to build an affect model for software production and test whether or not emotions and mood affect software development in a systematic way, and by how much. We will do this by conducting rigorous studies in Industry. Selected industry partners include both large organizations (IBM and Siemens) and medium and small enterprises (EduCode, Serenova, and BlueSpurs). These studies will rely on both quantitative and qualitative measures to ensure we capture the contribution of affect in the most comprehensive way possible. Our results, whether positive or negative, will shine a new light on the human aspect of software development, one that has been traditionally very difficult to qualify. The expertise gained in these studies will directly involve more 77 graduate students and benefit more than 1,100 students in five years through directed courses and participation in graduate and undergraduate research. Furthermore, if the results warrant further involvement from industry partners, we will create a centre of excellence where research results can be transferred to the industry as technology (tools) and dedicated instruction (methods). Finally, our results will be published in conferences, journals, book chapters, and books; and the study data will be made available on the University's Open Access archive. This will be crucial to guide future researchers on new discovery paths for software development and have the potential to provide billions of dollars in benefits if adopted by even a very small percentage of global Industry.