Software developers are known to experience a wide range of emotions while performing development tasks. Emotions are often associated with two major aspects of software engineering, namely problem solving and communication within a software development team. In this talk we give an overview of our research on emotions in software engineering - how can we understand the ways they are experienced and expressed, and what kind of tools we can use when conducting such studies. This talk is based on a series of studies conducted in 2021-2024.

Alexander Serebrenik is a full professor of social software engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. His research goal is to facilitate evolution of software by taking into account social aspects of software development. His work tends to involve theories and methods both from within computer science (e.g., theory of socio-technical coordination; methods from natural language processing, machine learning) and from outside of computer science (e.g., organisational psychology). The underlying idea of his work is that of empiricism, i.e., that addressing software engineering challenges should be grounded in observation and experimentation, and requires a combination of the social and the technical perspectives. Alexander has co-authored a book “Evolving Software Systems” (Springer Verlag, 2014), “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Software Engineering: Best Practices and Insights” (APress, 2024) and more than 250 scientific papers and articles. He is actively involved in organisation of scientific conferences and is member of the editorial board of several journals. He has won multiple best paper and distinguished reviewer awards. Alexander is a senior member of IEEE and a member of ACM. Contact him at a.serebrenik@tue.nl.