Measuring affective states from technical debt: A psychoempirical software engineering experiment
This addresses the under-representation of human factors in technical debt research for software engineering, though it is incremental in linking specific design smells to emotional impacts.
The study investigated how technical debt affects software practitioners' affective states, finding that different design smells negatively or positively impact emotions and that technical debt is psychologically taxing, based on a mixed-methods experiment with 40 participants from 12 companies.
Software engineering is a human activity. Despite this, human aspects are under-represented in technical debt research, perhaps because they are challenging to evaluate. This study's objective was to investigate the relationship between technical debt and affective states (feelings, emotions, and moods) from software practitioners. Forty participants (N = 40) from twelve companies took part in a mixed-methods approach, consisting of a repeated-measures (r = 5) experiment (n = 200), a survey, and semi-structured interviews. The statistical analysis shows that different design smells (strong indicators of technical debt) negatively or positively impact affective states. From the qualitative data, it is clear that technical debt activates a substantial portion of the emotional spectrum and is psychologically taxing. Further, the practitioners' reactions to technical debt appear to fall in different levels of maturity. We argue that human aspects in technical debt are important factors to consider, as they may result in, e.g., procrastination, apprehension, and burnout.