Toward a Model of Emotional Contagion Influence on Agile Development for Mission Critical Systems

This position paper provides a framework to test positive and negative emotional contagion between agile teams for producing mission critical systems in order to enhance agile teams' cooperativeness and performance, lower conflicts, and to make decisions more accurate. Due to human errors in analyzing, designing, implementing, and testing phases for producing mission critical systems, losses and risks are significantly higher than other systems; while the adoption of agile development processes in mission critical systems has shown promising results of minimizing risks and costs. However, agile processes are people-oriented where human error is the main contributor to the success or failure of the system. Within the software industry, studies have investigated developers' conation and cognition to enhance their performance and communication within teams, while the role of affect (emotions and moods) was neglected for decades. Emotional contagion, as a factor of affect influence, has only been tested in studies at the managerial decision-making level; while no evidence of such studies that investigate whether or not the emotional contagion influences behavioural groups in agile developments which is the main concern of this paper.