Motivation

Affective computing is the study and development of systems and devices that can recognize, interpret, process, and simulate human affects, i.e. the experience of feelings or emotions. Over the past decade, research has shown the impact of affective states on work performance and on team collaboration. This also applies for software engineering that involves people in a broad range of activities, where personality, moods, and emotions play a crucial role. For successful software engineering projects, stakeholders need to experience positive affect (such as trust or appreciation), to agree on display rules for emotions, and to hold mutual commitment to the project goals. Recently, researchers started to study the role of affective computing and affective states in software engineering. However, contributions on this topic are currently presented and discussed in diverse conferences and workshops. This workshop follows-up of the first edition held at ICSE 2016, towards the consolidation of an international, sustainable forum for researchers and practitioners interested in the role of affect in software engineering to meet, present, and discuss their work-in-progress. High-quality contributions about empirical studies, theoretical models, as well as tools for supporting emotion awareness in software engineering are invited to the workshop, both from academia and industry.

Topics

Affective states play a crucial role in daily work since they might affect the performance and outcome of both individual and group activities. Personality traits, moods, and emotions contribute to the affective climate of a project or an organization, since affective states are constantly experienced and communicated through direct or computer-mediated interactions. Leveraging emotion awareness in software engineering could enhance the development performance, quality of software, mood regulation within a project team, and fruitful interactions with all stakeholders involved in the software engineering domain.

This workshop aims at identifying and addressing challenges posed by emotion awareness in software engineering. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Impact of affective states (emotions, moods, attitudes, personality traits) on individual and group performance, commitment and collaboration in software engineering
  • The role of affect in the social programmer ecosystem
  • Leveraging stakeholders’ affective feedback to improve software, tools, and processes (e.g., sentiment analysis of users’ feedback, aspect-based sentiment analysis of product reviews, etc.)
  • Design, development, and evaluation of tools for supporting emotion awareness in software engineering
  • Reusable software frameworks, APIs, and patterns for designing and maintaining affect-aware systems
  • Ethnographic approaches to affect monitoring in the workplace of software projects
  • Psychology of programming and modelling of affective states (e.g., psychological models of affect in software engineering, understanding the trigger behind emotions during developers’ activities, etc.)
  • Affective state detection from multimodal analysis of spontaneous communicative behavior such as natural language processing, use of biometric measurements, analysis of body posture and gesture, speech analysis
  • Affect sensing from communication artifacts (e.g., message boards, issue tracking, social media)
  • Methodologies 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
  • Methodologies and standards

Types of Contributions

We invite three kinds of submissions:

  • Full papers (6 pages) describing emotion awareness challenges, needs, novel approaches, and frameworks. New approaches must be evaluated with users in this category. Empirical evaluation papers and industrial experience reports are also welcome.
  • Short position papers (3-4 pages) describing a new idea or work in progress.
  • Posters, data showcase and demo papers (1-2 pages) summarizing a research project, tool, technique or datasets.

All papers must conform, at time of submission, to the ICSE formatting guidelines for Technical Research. All submissions must be in English.

Papers must be submitted electronically, in PDF format. Submissions should be made at the following website: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=semotion17

Papers will be evaluated based on their originality, relevance to the workshop, and their potential for discussion. The papers with the best reviews will be accepted to be presented and discussed in the workshop. Accepted papers will be published as an ICSE 2016 Workshop Proceedings in the ACM and IEEE Digital Libraries and 
will be distributed to the workshop participants. The official publication date of the workshop proceedings is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of ICSE 2016. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

It is the desire of the organizers that discussion of research at the workshop does not preclude publication of closely related material at conferences or journals. Therefore, authors of accepted papers will be able to choose whether to include their papers in the workshop proceedings.

Special Issue on Affect Awareness in Software Engineering.  Authors of distinguished papers will be invited to submit an extended version to the special issue on Affect Awareness in Software Engineering of the Journal of Systems and Software.

Important Dates

Paper submissions due: January 27, 2017
Notification to authors: February 17, 2017
Camera-ready copies due: February 27, 2017
Workshop: tba

Organizers

Program Committee

  • Raian Ali, Bournemouth University, United Kingdom
  • Roman Bednarik, Univ. of Eastern Finland, Finland
  • Kelly Blincoe, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand
  • Fabio Calefato, University of Bari, Italy
  • Daniela Damian, University of Victoria, Canada
  • Giuseppe Destefanis, Brunel University, UK
  • Prasun Dewan, U. North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA
  • Daniel Graziotin, University of Stuttgart, Germany
  • Hideaki Hata, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
  • Filippo Lanubile, University of Bari, Italy
  • Seok-Won Lee, Ajou University, Republic of Korea
  • Mika Mäntylä, University of Oulu, Finland
  • Viviana Patti, University of Turin, Italy
  • Chris Parnin, North Carolina State University, USA
  • Ayushi Rastogi, IIIT-D, India
  • David Redmiles, University of California, USA
  • Alexander Serebrenik, Eindhoven University of Tehnology, The Netherlands
  • Bonita Sharif, Youngstown State University, USA
  • Janet Siegmund, University of Passau, Germany
  • Michał Wróbel, Gdansk Univ. of Technology, Poland