Affect and Affective Trust in Agile Requirements Engineering

Agile practices overcome many challenges in Requirements Engineering (RE); but they contribute to create new challenges, such as a lack of customer trust and consensus during the iterative RE. Recently, researchers have shed light on affect and affective trust as influential factors on individual behaviour in software development. This position paper proposes a framework to consider the role of affect and affective trust within agile practices for RE in order to recognize the positive and negative influences of affect and affective trust. The framework considers the positive affects as an indicator for increasing the amount of affective trust between agile team members, including customers. Further, the framework highlights the possible role of negative affects in order to recognize the negative consequences on agile practices along with the amount of affective trust during the iterative RE. This ongoing research intends to collect and analyze both quantitative and qualitative data in the forms of survey research and interviews in order to test the framework and confirm the research hypotheses.