  Software development is intellectual, based on collaboration, and performed
in a highly demanding economic market. As such, it is dominated by time
pressure, stress, and emotional trauma. While studies of affect are emerging
and rising in software engineering research, stress has yet to find its place
in the literature despite that it is highly related to affect. In this paper,
we study stress coping with the affect-laden framework of Salutogenesis, which
is a validated psychological framework for enhancing mental health through a
feeling of coherence. We propose a controlled experiment for testing our
hypotheses that a static analysis tool enhanced with the Salutogenesis model
will bring 1) a higher number of fixed quality issues, 2) reduced cognitive
load, 3) reduction of the overall stress, and 4) positive affect induction
effects to developers. The experiment will make use of validated physiological
measurements of stress as proxied by cortisol and alpha-amylase levels in
saliva samples, a psychometrically validated measurement of mood and affect
disposition, and stress inductors such as a cognitive load task. Our
hypotheses, if empirically supported, will lead to the creation of
environments, methods, and tools that alleviate stress among developers while
enhancing affect on the job and task performance.
