AgileMood: A Tool for Ongoing Measurement of Psychological Safety in Agile Teams
Resumo
Psychological safety and individual emotions have proven essential for the effective functioning of agile teams, directly impacting collaboration, collective performance and ultimately, software quality. This paper presents AgileMood, a tool designed to diagnose and enhance psychological safety and emotional awareness in agile teams through the collection of periodic anonymous feedback, the calculation of specific metrics, and the generation of dynamic visualizations. The solution not only measures the overall perceived level of safety and emotions but also detects internal variations among team members, enabling data-driven interventions. Agile-Mood distinguishes itself from existing approaches by incorporating well-established theoretical foundations, preserving anonymity, and offering practical support for decision-making by team leaders. The empirical evaluation of the tool, conducted through a case study involving 41 students (7 teams of 5 to 8 team members), utilized the System Usability Scale (SUS) and the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), demonstrating promising usability and high perceived usefulness. Available as open-source software, the tool facilitates replicability and further development by the community. As a contribution, this work proposes a practice-oriented artifact with the potential to transform psychological safety and emotions into a measurable and manageable element within agile software development teams, thereby fostering improved software quality. Future studies should empirically evaluate its application in real organizational contexts.
Palavras-chave:
Psychological safety, Emotions, Agile Teams, Software Engineering, Tools
Referências
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Adam Alami, Oliver Krancher, and Maria Paasivaara. 2022. The journey to technical excellence in agile software development. Information and Software Technology 150 (2022), 106959.
Adam Alami, Mansooreh Zahedi, and Oliver Krancher. 2023. Antecedents of psychological safety in agile software development teams. Information and Software Technology 162 (2023), 107267.
Adam Alami, Mansooreh Zahedi, and Oliver Krancher. 2024. The role of psychological safety in promoting software quality in agile teams. Empirical Software Engineering 29, 5 (2024), 119.
Markus Baer and Michael Frese. 2003. Innovation is not enough: Climates for initiative and psychological safety, process innovations, and firm performance. Journal of Organizational Behavior: The International Journal of Industrial, Occupational and Organizational Psychology and Behavior 24, 1 (2003), 45–68.
Aaron Bangor, Philip T Kortum, and James T Miller. 2008. An empirical evaluation of the system usability scale. Intl. Journal of Human–Computer Interaction 24, 6 (2008), 574–594.
Roy F. Baumeister, Kathleen D. Vohs, C. Nathan DeWall, and Liang Zhang. 2007. How Emotion Shapes Behavior: Feedback, Anticipation, and Reflection, Rather Than Direct Causation. Personality and Social Psychology Review 11, 2 (2007), 167–203. DOI: 10.1177/1088868307301033
Kimberley Breevaart, Arnold B Bakker, Evangelia Demerouti, and Daantje Derks. 2016. Who takes the lead? A multi-source diary study on leadership, work engagement, and job performance. Journal of Organizational Behavior 37, 3 (2016), 309–325.
John Brooke et al. 1996. SUS-A quick and dirty usability scale. Usability evaluation in industry 189, 194 (1996), 4–7.
Marte Pettersen Buvik and Anastasiia Tkalich. 2021. Psychological safety in agile software development teams: Work design antecedents and performance consequences. arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.15034 (2021).
Lan Cao and Eun Hee Park. 2017. Understanding goal-directed emotions in agile software development teams. (2017).
Abraham Carmeli and Jody Hoffer Gittell. 2009. High-quality relationships, psychological safety, and learning from failures in work organizations. Journal of Organizational Behavior: The International Journal of Industrial, Occupational and Organizational Psychology and Behavior 30, 6 (2009), 709–729.
Shane Connelly and Brita S. Torrence. 2018. The Relevance of Discrete Emotional Experiences for Human Resource Management: Connecting Positive and Negative Emotions to HRM. Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management 36 (2018), 1–49. DOI: 10.1108/S0742-730120180000036001
Broderick Crawford, Ricardo Soto, Claudio León de la Barra, Kathleen Crawford, and Eduardo Olguín. 2014. The influence of emotions on productivity in software engineering. In International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. Springer, 307–310.
Fred D Davis. 1989. Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and user acceptance of information technology. MIS quarterly (1989), 319–340.
Fred D Davis, Richard P Bagozzi, and Paul R Warshaw. 1989. User acceptance of computer technology: A comparison of two theoretical models. Management science 35, 8 (1989), 982–1003.
Amy Edmondson. 1999. Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative science quarterly 44, 2 (1999), 350–383.
Amy C Edmondson and Zhike Lei. 2014. Psychological safety: The history, renaissance, and future of an interpersonal construct. Annu. Rev. Organ. Psychol. Organ. Behav. 1, 1 (2014), 23–43.
Robert Feldt and Ana Magazinius. 2010. Validity threats in empirical software engineering research-an initial survey.. In Seke. 374–379.
M Lance Frazier, Stav Fainshmidt, Ryan L Klinger, Amir Pezeshkan, and Veselina Vracheva. 2017. Psychological safety: A meta-analytic review and extension. Personnel psychology 70, 1 (2017), 113–165.
Bård Fyhn, Henning Bang, Therese Egeland, and Vidar Schei. 2023. Safe among the unsafe: Psychological safety climate strength matters for team performance. Small Group Research 54, 4 (2023), 439–473.
Daniela Grassi, Filippo Lanubile, Nicole Novielli, and Alexander Serebrenik. 2023. Towards supporting emotion awareness in retrospective meetings. In 2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering: New Ideas and Emerging Results (ICSE-NIER). IEEE, 101–105.
Daniel Graziotin, Fabian Fagerholm, Xiaofeng Wang, and Pekka Abrahamsson. 2018. What happens when software developers are (un) happy. Journal of Systems and Software 140 (2018), 32–47.
Daniel Graziotin, Xiaofeng Wang, and Pekka Abrahamsson. 2014. Happy software developers solve problems better: psychological measurements in empirical software engineering. PeerJ 2 (2014), e289. URL [link] (2014).
Daniel Graziotin, Xiaofeng Wang, and Pekka Abrahamsson. 2015. Do feelings matter? On the correlation of affects and the self-assessed productivity in software engineering. Journal of Software: Evolution and Process 27, 7 (2015), 467–487.
André Luiz Nunes Kaiser, Eliezer Dutra, and Gleison Santos. 2025. Investigating How Psychological Safety Can Be Fostered in Agile Teams. In Simpósio Brasileiro de Engenharia de Software (SBES). SBC, 348–359.
Helena Lee. 2021. Changes in workplace practices during the COVID-19 pandemic: the roles of emotion, psychological safety and organisation support. Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and Performance 8, 1 (2021), 97–128. DOI: 10.1108/JOEPP-07-2020-0125
Per Lenberg and Robert Feldt. 2018. Psychological safety and norm clarity in software engineering teams. In Proceedings of the 11th international workshop on cooperative and human aspects of software engineering. 79–86.
Tan Trung Luong, Uthayasankar Sivarajah, and Vishanth Weerakkody. 2021. Do agile managed information systems projects fail due to a lack of emotional intelligence? Information Systems Frontiers 23, 2 (2021), 415–433.
Kashumi Madampe, John Grundy, Minh Nguyen, Ellen Welstead-Cloud, Vinh Tuan Huynh, Linh Doan, William Lay, and Sayed Hashim. 2025. EmoReflex: an AI-powered emotion-centric developer insights platform. Automated Software Engineering 32, 1 (2025), 22.
Kashumi Madampe, Rashina Hoda, and John Grundy. 2022. The role of emotional intelligence in handling requirements changes in software engineering. arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.11603 (2022).
Marcelo Marinho, Fernanda Albuquerque, Luis Amorim, and Suzana Sampaio. 2025. Explorando a Influência da Segurança Psicológica na Qualidade do Software em Equipes Ágeis. In Simpósio Brasileiro de Engenharia de Software (SBES). SBC, 60–70.
Marcelo Marinho, Luís Amorim, Rafael Camara, Brigitte Renata Oliveira, Marcos Sobral, and Suzana Sampaio. 2021. Happier and further by going together: The importance of software team behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic. Technology in society 67 (2021), 101799.
Marcelo Marinho, John Noll, Ita Richardson, and Sarah Beecham. 2019. Plandriven approaches are alive and kicking in agile global software development. In 2019 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM). IEEE, 1–11.
Claudio Saraiva Mattos, Eliezer Dutra, and Gleison Santos. 2024. An Instrument for Assessing Power Distance in Agile Organizations-Preliminary Results. In Proceedings of the XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality. 136–146.
Alexander Newman, Ross Donohue, and Nathan Eva. 2017. Psychological safety: A systematic review of the literature. Human resource management review 27, 3 (2017), 521–535.
Nicole Novielli, Fabio Calefato, and Filippo Lanubile. 2018. A gold standard for emotion annotation in stack overflow. In 2018 IEEE/ACM 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR). IEEE, 14ś17 (2018).
Per Runeson and Martin Höst. 2009. Guidelines for conducting and reporting case study research in software engineering. Empirical software engineering 14, 2 (2009), 131–164.
Borrego Gilberto Salido, Martin, Ramón René Palacio Cinco, Luis-Felipe Rodríguez, et al. 2023. Agile software engineers’ affective states, their performance and software quality: a systematic mapping review. Journal of Systems and Software 204 (2023), 111800.
Kurt Schneider, Jil Klünder, Fabian Kortum, Lisa Handke, Julia Straube, and Simone Kauffeld. 2018. Positive affect through interactions in meetings: The role of proactive and supportive statements. Journal of Systems and Software 143 (2018), 59–70.
Falk Schuetzenmeister. 2010. University research management: An exploratory literature review. (2010).
Leo Silva, Marília Castro, Miriam Silva, Milena Santos, Uirá Kulesza, Margarida Lima, and Henrique Madeira. 2022. Emotional Dashboard: a Non-Intrusive Approach to Monitor Software Developers’ Emotions and Personality Traits. In 2022 IEEE 22nd International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS). IEEE, 366–375.
Anastasiia Tkalich, Darja Šmite, Nina Haugland Andersen, and Nils Brede Moe. 2022. What happens to psychological safety when going remote? Ieee Software 41, 1 (2022), 113–122.
Philippe Vandekerkhof, Tiny Steijvers, Wout Hendriks, and Wim Voordeckers. 2018. Socioemotional wealth separation and decision-making quality in family firm TMTs: The moderating role of psychological safety. Journal of Management Studies 55, 4 (2018), 648–676. DOI: 10.1111/joms.12277
Viswanath Venkatesh and Fred D Davis. 2000. A theoretical extension of the technology acceptance model: Four longitudinal field studies. Management science 46, 2 (2000), 186–204.
Sai Datta Vishnubhotla, Emilia Mendes, and Lars Lundberg. 2018. An insight into the capabilities of professionals and teams in agile software development: A systematic literature review. In Proceedings of the 2018 7th international conference on software and computer applications. 10–19.
Antoinette Weibel, Deanne N. Den Hartog, Nicole Gillespie, Rosalind Searle, Frederik Six, and Denise Skinner. 2016. How do controls impact employee trust in the employer? Human Resource Management 55, 3 (2016), 437–462.
M West. 2018. How teams improve staff engagement and why it matters.
Claes Wohlin, Per Runeson, Martin Höst, Magnus C Ohlsson, Björn Regnell, Anders Wesslén, et al. 2012. Experimentation in software engineering. Vol. 236. Springer.
Mohammed-Amr Abd El-Migid, Damon Cai, Thomas Niven, Jeffrey Vo, Kashumi Madampe, John Grundy, and Rashina Hoda. 2022. Emotimonitor: A trello powerup to capture and monitor emotions of agile teams. Journal of Systems and Software 186 (2022), 111206.
Adam Alami, Oliver Krancher, and Maria Paasivaara. 2022. The journey to technical excellence in agile software development. Information and Software Technology 150 (2022), 106959.
Adam Alami, Mansooreh Zahedi, and Oliver Krancher. 2023. Antecedents of psychological safety in agile software development teams. Information and Software Technology 162 (2023), 107267.
Adam Alami, Mansooreh Zahedi, and Oliver Krancher. 2024. The role of psychological safety in promoting software quality in agile teams. Empirical Software Engineering 29, 5 (2024), 119.
Markus Baer and Michael Frese. 2003. Innovation is not enough: Climates for initiative and psychological safety, process innovations, and firm performance. Journal of Organizational Behavior: The International Journal of Industrial, Occupational and Organizational Psychology and Behavior 24, 1 (2003), 45–68.
Aaron Bangor, Philip T Kortum, and James T Miller. 2008. An empirical evaluation of the system usability scale. Intl. Journal of Human–Computer Interaction 24, 6 (2008), 574–594.
Roy F. Baumeister, Kathleen D. Vohs, C. Nathan DeWall, and Liang Zhang. 2007. How Emotion Shapes Behavior: Feedback, Anticipation, and Reflection, Rather Than Direct Causation. Personality and Social Psychology Review 11, 2 (2007), 167–203. DOI: 10.1177/1088868307301033
Kimberley Breevaart, Arnold B Bakker, Evangelia Demerouti, and Daantje Derks. 2016. Who takes the lead? A multi-source diary study on leadership, work engagement, and job performance. Journal of Organizational Behavior 37, 3 (2016), 309–325.
John Brooke et al. 1996. SUS-A quick and dirty usability scale. Usability evaluation in industry 189, 194 (1996), 4–7.
Marte Pettersen Buvik and Anastasiia Tkalich. 2021. Psychological safety in agile software development teams: Work design antecedents and performance consequences. arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.15034 (2021).
Lan Cao and Eun Hee Park. 2017. Understanding goal-directed emotions in agile software development teams. (2017).
Abraham Carmeli and Jody Hoffer Gittell. 2009. High-quality relationships, psychological safety, and learning from failures in work organizations. Journal of Organizational Behavior: The International Journal of Industrial, Occupational and Organizational Psychology and Behavior 30, 6 (2009), 709–729.
Shane Connelly and Brita S. Torrence. 2018. The Relevance of Discrete Emotional Experiences for Human Resource Management: Connecting Positive and Negative Emotions to HRM. Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management 36 (2018), 1–49. DOI: 10.1108/S0742-730120180000036001
Broderick Crawford, Ricardo Soto, Claudio León de la Barra, Kathleen Crawford, and Eduardo Olguín. 2014. The influence of emotions on productivity in software engineering. In International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. Springer, 307–310.
Fred D Davis. 1989. Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and user acceptance of information technology. MIS quarterly (1989), 319–340.
Fred D Davis, Richard P Bagozzi, and Paul R Warshaw. 1989. User acceptance of computer technology: A comparison of two theoretical models. Management science 35, 8 (1989), 982–1003.
Amy Edmondson. 1999. Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative science quarterly 44, 2 (1999), 350–383.
Amy C Edmondson and Zhike Lei. 2014. Psychological safety: The history, renaissance, and future of an interpersonal construct. Annu. Rev. Organ. Psychol. Organ. Behav. 1, 1 (2014), 23–43.
Robert Feldt and Ana Magazinius. 2010. Validity threats in empirical software engineering research-an initial survey.. In Seke. 374–379.
M Lance Frazier, Stav Fainshmidt, Ryan L Klinger, Amir Pezeshkan, and Veselina Vracheva. 2017. Psychological safety: A meta-analytic review and extension. Personnel psychology 70, 1 (2017), 113–165.
Bård Fyhn, Henning Bang, Therese Egeland, and Vidar Schei. 2023. Safe among the unsafe: Psychological safety climate strength matters for team performance. Small Group Research 54, 4 (2023), 439–473.
Daniela Grassi, Filippo Lanubile, Nicole Novielli, and Alexander Serebrenik. 2023. Towards supporting emotion awareness in retrospective meetings. In 2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering: New Ideas and Emerging Results (ICSE-NIER). IEEE, 101–105.
Daniel Graziotin, Fabian Fagerholm, Xiaofeng Wang, and Pekka Abrahamsson. 2018. What happens when software developers are (un) happy. Journal of Systems and Software 140 (2018), 32–47.
Daniel Graziotin, Xiaofeng Wang, and Pekka Abrahamsson. 2014. Happy software developers solve problems better: psychological measurements in empirical software engineering. PeerJ 2 (2014), e289. URL [link] (2014).
Daniel Graziotin, Xiaofeng Wang, and Pekka Abrahamsson. 2015. Do feelings matter? On the correlation of affects and the self-assessed productivity in software engineering. Journal of Software: Evolution and Process 27, 7 (2015), 467–487.
André Luiz Nunes Kaiser, Eliezer Dutra, and Gleison Santos. 2025. Investigating How Psychological Safety Can Be Fostered in Agile Teams. In Simpósio Brasileiro de Engenharia de Software (SBES). SBC, 348–359.
Helena Lee. 2021. Changes in workplace practices during the COVID-19 pandemic: the roles of emotion, psychological safety and organisation support. Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and Performance 8, 1 (2021), 97–128. DOI: 10.1108/JOEPP-07-2020-0125
Per Lenberg and Robert Feldt. 2018. Psychological safety and norm clarity in software engineering teams. In Proceedings of the 11th international workshop on cooperative and human aspects of software engineering. 79–86.
Tan Trung Luong, Uthayasankar Sivarajah, and Vishanth Weerakkody. 2021. Do agile managed information systems projects fail due to a lack of emotional intelligence? Information Systems Frontiers 23, 2 (2021), 415–433.
Kashumi Madampe, John Grundy, Minh Nguyen, Ellen Welstead-Cloud, Vinh Tuan Huynh, Linh Doan, William Lay, and Sayed Hashim. 2025. EmoReflex: an AI-powered emotion-centric developer insights platform. Automated Software Engineering 32, 1 (2025), 22.
Kashumi Madampe, Rashina Hoda, and John Grundy. 2022. The role of emotional intelligence in handling requirements changes in software engineering. arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.11603 (2022).
Marcelo Marinho, Fernanda Albuquerque, Luis Amorim, and Suzana Sampaio. 2025. Explorando a Influência da Segurança Psicológica na Qualidade do Software em Equipes Ágeis. In Simpósio Brasileiro de Engenharia de Software (SBES). SBC, 60–70.
Marcelo Marinho, Luís Amorim, Rafael Camara, Brigitte Renata Oliveira, Marcos Sobral, and Suzana Sampaio. 2021. Happier and further by going together: The importance of software team behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic. Technology in society 67 (2021), 101799.
Marcelo Marinho, John Noll, Ita Richardson, and Sarah Beecham. 2019. Plandriven approaches are alive and kicking in agile global software development. In 2019 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM). IEEE, 1–11.
Claudio Saraiva Mattos, Eliezer Dutra, and Gleison Santos. 2024. An Instrument for Assessing Power Distance in Agile Organizations-Preliminary Results. In Proceedings of the XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality. 136–146.
Alexander Newman, Ross Donohue, and Nathan Eva. 2017. Psychological safety: A systematic review of the literature. Human resource management review 27, 3 (2017), 521–535.
Nicole Novielli, Fabio Calefato, and Filippo Lanubile. 2018. A gold standard for emotion annotation in stack overflow. In 2018 IEEE/ACM 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR). IEEE, 14ś17 (2018).
Per Runeson and Martin Höst. 2009. Guidelines for conducting and reporting case study research in software engineering. Empirical software engineering 14, 2 (2009), 131–164.
Borrego Gilberto Salido, Martin, Ramón René Palacio Cinco, Luis-Felipe Rodríguez, et al. 2023. Agile software engineers’ affective states, their performance and software quality: a systematic mapping review. Journal of Systems and Software 204 (2023), 111800.
Kurt Schneider, Jil Klünder, Fabian Kortum, Lisa Handke, Julia Straube, and Simone Kauffeld. 2018. Positive affect through interactions in meetings: The role of proactive and supportive statements. Journal of Systems and Software 143 (2018), 59–70.
Falk Schuetzenmeister. 2010. University research management: An exploratory literature review. (2010).
Leo Silva, Marília Castro, Miriam Silva, Milena Santos, Uirá Kulesza, Margarida Lima, and Henrique Madeira. 2022. Emotional Dashboard: a Non-Intrusive Approach to Monitor Software Developers’ Emotions and Personality Traits. In 2022 IEEE 22nd International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS). IEEE, 366–375.
Anastasiia Tkalich, Darja Šmite, Nina Haugland Andersen, and Nils Brede Moe. 2022. What happens to psychological safety when going remote? Ieee Software 41, 1 (2022), 113–122.
Philippe Vandekerkhof, Tiny Steijvers, Wout Hendriks, and Wim Voordeckers. 2018. Socioemotional wealth separation and decision-making quality in family firm TMTs: The moderating role of psychological safety. Journal of Management Studies 55, 4 (2018), 648–676. DOI: 10.1111/joms.12277
Viswanath Venkatesh and Fred D Davis. 2000. A theoretical extension of the technology acceptance model: Four longitudinal field studies. Management science 46, 2 (2000), 186–204.
Sai Datta Vishnubhotla, Emilia Mendes, and Lars Lundberg. 2018. An insight into the capabilities of professionals and teams in agile software development: A systematic literature review. In Proceedings of the 2018 7th international conference on software and computer applications. 10–19.
Antoinette Weibel, Deanne N. Den Hartog, Nicole Gillespie, Rosalind Searle, Frederik Six, and Denise Skinner. 2016. How do controls impact employee trust in the employer? Human Resource Management 55, 3 (2016), 437–462.
M West. 2018. How teams improve staff engagement and why it matters.
Claes Wohlin, Per Runeson, Martin Höst, Magnus C Ohlsson, Björn Regnell, Anders Wesslén, et al. 2012. Experimentation in software engineering. Vol. 236. Springer.
Publicado
04/11/2025
Como Citar
MELO, Arthur M. B.; MARINHO, Marcelo; SAMPAIO, Suzana.
AgileMood: A Tool for Ongoing Measurement of Psychological Safety in Agile Teams. In: SIMPÓSIO BRASILEIRO DE QUALIDADE DE SOFTWARE (SBQS), 24. , 2025, São José dos Campos/SP.
Anais [...].
Porto Alegre: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação,
2025
.
p. 226-236.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/sbqs.2025.14998.
