New trends and ideasEmotimonitor: A Trello power-up to capture and monitor emotions of Agile teams☆
Introduction
With the growing popularity of agile methods, teams have adopted innovative approaches to ensure productivity and facilitate a development cycle that is flexible and constantly evolving. With such an environment in which team members are required to welcome requirement changes late in development (Beck et al., 2001) among other things, examining the subsequent impact on emotions provides an opportunity to explore whether such emotions can be accurately captured and acknowledged to boost productivity. This is fundamental, as research indicates that emotions have direct linkages to productivity (Graziotin et al., 2014a, Graziotin et al., 2015), through stimulating cognitive processing abilities and creativity. Research has found the influence of emotions on the effectiveness of software engineers as “unquestionable” (Kołakowska et al., 2013). This, along with the current lack of support available for capturing developer emotions during development processes, necessitates an efficient emotion capturing tool.
Trello is a widely used tool by Agile teams in the industry due to its Scrum and Kanban like conducive interface, lending itself to project management and task organisation (Johnson, 2017). The simple ability to create cards to represent tasks as well as to update the state of these cards by moving them between lists mirrors the aim of Agile methods such as Scrum in quickly developing, testing and releasing features which can be represented as moving cards between lists to update their state.
After considering existing alternatives, we have designed and developed Emotimonitor, a Trello power-up (i.e. extension or plugin) that enables Agile team members to self-report their emotional reactions with respect to tasks. Such a tool relies on emojis to reflect emotional states and provides a platform for team leaders to view the responses of their team in order to justify taking actions such as reevaluating the requirements of tasks should there be a negative response to them. Emotimonitor is extensible and has potential to improve team dynamics across agile teams, through enabling emotion identification to be a central element of retrospective processes.
The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 outlines the motivation for our work. This will be followed with an analysis of related tools in Section 3. This will be followed by Section 4 which describes the research approach and development methodology used. Section 5 then discusses Emotimonitor’s architecture followed by a discussion of its intended usage in Section 6. Section 7 will describe our evaluation process, followed by Section 7.3 discussing threats to the validity of our research along with Section 7.4 which will outline planned future work for Emotimonitor. This will lastly be followed with the conclusion of our research findings.
Section snippets
Motivation
Agile practices in project management are becoming increasingly prominent, not only within the software development industry in which they arose, but in other disciplines as well. They are distinguished from older “heavy-weight” methods primarily by the degree to which they encourage flexibility and evolution, both in responding to change and in driving change (Hoda et al., 2018) — the Manifesto for Agile Software Development (Beck et al., 2001) fundamental to the Agile movement, calls for
Related work
Given our motivation to develop a tool to reflect team member emotions, our initial research methodology involved researching existing Trello and JIRA power-ups. This research yielded a dual benefit: it enabled verification of whether our envisioned target tool already existed, and enabled us to examine the advantages and disadvantages of related tools. Ingrained as part of this research was a review of tools currently utilised for emotion-information gathering purposes. Upon closer inspection,
Our approach
Our aim was to develop a Trello power-up aimed at effectively capturing emotions of a team member at various stages of an agile project. Such a power-up would necessitate an intuitive, simple and fast user interface as well as the ability to capture the necessary data required. This information would include: The emotions of a team member with respect to a given card, The time of the emotional response, and the stage of the card when the emotional response was captured. The envisioned tool
Interface design
The development process began with designing an interface for Emotimonitor; to go about this, a series of mock-up diagrams were fabricated by the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th authors and reviewed by the 5th and 6th authors. Feedback from the latter culminated in an iterative improvement process where intended UI options and design were continuously refined and reviewed, before a final design was realised. Design considerations discussed as part of these meetings included the location of emojis,
Usage example
Recall the dilemma outlined in Section 2. Consider a developer, Kashumi, who is working on a free-to-play mobile game and feeling somewhat anxious about integrating microtransactions into the game: Emotimonitor provides a means of capturing her emotional state not currently possible in Trello. By navigating to the card in question and selecting the button under ‘Add Emotion’, Kashumi will be provided with the following set of emotional scales, where she can select relevant emotions that apply
Evaluation method
With the time constraints of this research project, it was decided to evaluate Emotimonitor from the user experience perspective at this stage. Further evaluation from different perspectives is anticipated in the future. Below, the conducted user evaluation from user experience perspective is explained.
In preparation for user testing, ethics approval was taken from the Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee.8
Conclusion
In this paper we have presented Emotimonitor, a proof-of-concept Trello extension that enables Agile team members to record emotional responses in the face of changing requirements. Unlike existing alternatives that adopt underlying machine learning to produce conclusions of emotion states, Emotimonitor provides flexibility for team members to record their emotions real-time through a clear user interface. Accompanying this flexibility is the ability for Agile team managers to gauge the
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Mohammed-Amr Abd El-Migid: Software, Investigation, Writing – original draft. Damon Cai: Software, Investigation, Writing – original draft. Thomas Niven: Software, Investigation, Writing – original draft. Jeffrey Vo: Software, Investigation, Writing – original draft. Kashumi Madampe: Conceptualization, Methodology, Data curation, Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Project administration. John Grundy: Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing, Supervision. Rashina Hoda:
Acknowledgements
Madampe is supported by a Monash Faculty of IT scholarship, Australia, and Grundy is supported by ARC Laureate Fellowship, Australia FL190100035.
Mohammed-Amr Abd El-Migid Software Engineering graduate from Faculty of IT, Monash University, Australia.
References (20)
- et al.
Emotion-oriented requirements engineering: A case study in developing a smart home system for the elderly
J. Syst. Softw.
(2019) - et al.
Manifesto for agile software development
(2001) - et al.
EmoTxt: A toolkit for emotion recognition from text
- Cao, L., Park, E.H., 2017. Understanding goal-directed emotions in Agile software development teams. In: Human Capital...
Card reactions
(2020)- et al.
Do project managers’ leadership competencies contribute to project success?
Proj. Manage. J.
(2008) - et al.
Happy software developers solve problems better: psychological measurements in empirical software engineering
PeerJ
(2014) - et al.
Software developers, moods, emotions, and performance
IEEE Softw.
(2014) - et al.
Do feelings matter? On the correlation of affects and the self-assessed productivity in software engineering
J. Softw.: Evol. Process
(2015) PostgreSQL
(2020)
Cited by (10)
Intentions to continue using agile methods: The case of the Greek banking sector
2023, Journal of Systems and SoftwareA Framework for Emotion-Oriented Requirements Change Handling in Agile Software Engineering
2023, IEEE Transactions on Software EngineeringThe Emotional Roller Coaster of Responding to Requirements Changes in Software Engineering
2023, IEEE Transactions on Software EngineeringAgile work practices and team creativity: the mediating role of team efficacy
2023, Journal of Organizational EffectivenessMulti-Modal Emotion Recognition for Enhanced Requirements Engineering: A Novel Approach
2023, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Requirements EngineeringTowards Supporting Emotion Awareness in Retrospective Meetings
2023, Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering
Mohammed-Amr Abd El-Migid Software Engineering graduate from Faculty of IT, Monash University, Australia.
Damon Cai Software Engineering graduate from Faculty of IT, Monash University, Australia.
Thomas Niven Software Engineering graduate from Faculty of IT, Monash University, Australia.
Jeffrey Vo Software Engineering graduate from Faculty of IT, Monash University, Australia.
Kashumi Madampe is a final year Ph.D. candidate at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Ms. Madampe did part of her current research at The University of Auckland, New Zealand. Prior to the Ph.D. candidature, she was in the software development industry as a project manager and a business analyst. Her research interests are requirements engineering, human and social aspects of software engineering, software repository mining, grounded theory, and natural language processing. She serves as the XP2021 poster co-chair, ASE2021 publicity and social media co-chair, and CHASE2021 social media chair. More details about her research can be found at https://kashumim.com Contact her at [email protected].
John Grundy received the B.Sc. (Hons), M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is an Australian Laureate fellow and a professor of software engineering at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. He is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, the Automated Software Engineering Journal, and IEEE Software. His current interests include domain-specific visual languages, model-driven engineering, large-scale systems engineering, and software engineering education. More details about his research can be found at https://sites.google.com/site/johncgrundy/. Contact him at [email protected].
Rashina Hoda is an Associate Professor in Software Engineering at the Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Melbourne. Her research focuses on human and social aspects of software engineering, socio-technical grounded theory, and serious game design. She serves on the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering review board, IEEE Software advisory board, as ICSE2021 social media co-chair, CHASE 2021 program co-chair, and ICSE2023 SEIS co-chair. For details see www.rashina.com. Contact her at [email protected].