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支出将不可避免地增长到近3.5万亿美元。软件开发项目现在通常与大型制造项目相当，并且具有可比的预算。在过去的十年中，敏捷过程已经开发出来，以解决软件开发的无形性质，以更加迭代的方式创建软件，一次一个，并由客户需求指导。今天的工业声称使用敏捷过程，或其中的一部分，用于他们开发工作的相当大的一部分。人类是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。做出一个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几乎没有被认为是迄今为止，我们建议建立一个影响模型的软件生产和测试是否情绪和情绪影响软件开发系统的方式，以及有多少。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和西门子）和中小型企业（EduCode，Serenova和BlueSpurs）。这些研究将依赖于定量和定性的措施，以确保我们以最全面的方式捕捉影响的贡献。我们的结果，无论是正面的还是负面的，都将为软件开发中的人性化方面带来新的曙光，而这一点在传统上是很难确定的。在这些研究中获得的专业知识将直接涉及77名研究生，并通过指导课程和参与研究生和本科生研究，在五年内使1,100多名学生受益。此外，如果研究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中心，将研究成果作为技术（工具）和专用指令（方法）转移到行业。最后，我们的研究结果将发表在会议，期刊，书籍章节和书籍中;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探索软件开发的新途径至关重要，如果被全球工业中很小一部分采用，就有可能带来数十亿美元的收益。

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.