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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.

Learning strategies (cognition), emotion (affection) and conation are suggested as important elements of success for engineering students. Identifying student learning profile may help improve successful rate in engineering program. An instrument that can be used for reliably assessing the cognitive- affective-conative profile of students is needed. This paper report the development and initial testing of the questionnaire (CACQ). Quantitative procedures were used. The set of questionnaire was distributed to 207 final year engineering students after being reviewed by four experts. Each of the constructs reached a good reliability value. Strong and positive correlations were established between learning strategy, emotion, conation and achievement motivation measures. The strength of correlations between the constructs also provides an indicator to the unidimensionality of the constructs. This new questionnaire is a promising measure for assessing the cognitive, affective and conative profile of engineering students.

This conceptual paper is a review of the literature concerning conation. Although there is no single definition for conation, it has been described in several ways including the mental procedure directed toward action including volition and drive, or as the connection between cognition and affect to action. The historical aspects, applications, and research methods for studying conation are brief but informative. Based on the literature review, the application of conation appears to hold considerable promise, especially within the realm of sociotechnical design/systems.