  Background: The experience sampling method studies everyday experiences of
humans in natural environments. In psychology it has been used to study the
relationships between work well-being and productivity. To our best knowledge,
daily experience sampling has not been previously used in software engineering.
Aims: Our aim is to identify links between software developers self-reported
affective states and work well-being and measures obtained from software
repositories. Method: We perform an experience sampling study in a software
company for a period of eight months, we use logistic regression to link the
well-being measures with development activities, i.e. number of commits and
chat messages. Results: We find several significant relationships between
questionnaire variables and software repository variables. To our surprise
relationship between hurry and number of commits is negative, meaning more
perceived hurry is linked with a smaller number of commits. We also find a
negative relationship between social interaction and hindered work well-being.
Conclusions: The negative link between commits and hurry is counter-intuitive
and goes against previous lab-experiments in software engineering that show
increased efficiency under time pressure. Overall, our work is an initial step
in using experience sampling in software engineering and validating theories on
work well-being from other fields in the domain of software engineering.
