Meetings and Mood -- Related or Not? Insights from Student Software Projects

Abstract: Background: Teamwork, coordination, and communication are a prerequisite for the timely completion of a software project. Meetings as a facilitator for coordination and communication are an established medium for information exchange. Analyses of meetings in software projects have shown that certain interactions in these meetings, such as proactive statements followed by supportive ones, influence the mood and motivation of a team, which in turn affects its productivity. So far, however, research has focused only on certain interactions at a detailed level, requiring a complex and fine-grained analysis of a meeting itself. Aim: In this paper, we investigate meetings from a more abstract perspective, focusing on the polarity of the statements, i.e., whether they appear to be positive, negative, or neutral. Method: We analyze the relationship between the polarity of statements in meetings and different social aspects, including conflicts as well as the mood before and after a meeting. Results: Our results emerge from 21 student software project meetings and show some interesting insights: (1) Positive mood before a meeting is both related to the amount of positive statements in the beginning, as well as throughout the whole meeting, (2) negative mood before the meeting only influences the amount of negative statements in the first quarter of the meeting, but not the whole meeting, and (3) the amount of positive and negative statements during the meeting has no influence on the mood afterwards. Conclusions: We conclude that the behaviour in meetings might rather influence short-term emotional states (feelings) than long-term emotional states (mood), which are more important for the project.