Affective agile design a proposal for a new software development model

This paper deals with two apparently distant and well-known technologies: the agile development methodology and the affective design discipline. The aim of the paper consists of investigating how to combine the two technologies in order to obtain a new software development model: the affective agile design. The innovative software development model, indeed, leverages agile - Scrum Framework guidelines and recalls affective design practices that consist of collecting and analyzing emotional feedback during the running process. The proposed model, furthermore, address firmly people-oriented principles, that have opened up a new front in regards of the needs of the productive path, calling in a loud voice the initiation of affective design practices. The main pillars of the proposed agile affective design model are the following: defining the points of the process where iteration with individuals is strong, intercepting their emotional expressions, analyzing their useful contributions and proceeding with systematic affective analysis leading to an optimized process of change management. In order to measure the validity of the proposed model, a real instance of a software developed by using the basic agile methodology at Fastweb Spa has been studied. The results have demonstrated that the benefits obtained by the use of the proposed innovative software development model overcome the main pain-points identified in the use case.