The Influence of Technical Debt on Software Developer Morale
Journal article, 2020

Context: Previous research in the Technical Debt (TD) field has mainly focused on the technical and economic aspects, while its human aspect has received minimal attention.

Objective: This paper aims to understand how software developers’ morale is influenced by TD and how their morale is influenced by TD management activities. Furthermore, this study correlates the morale with the amount of wastage of time due to TD.

Method: Firstly, we conducted 15 interviews with professionals, and, secondly, these data were complemented with a survey. Thirdly, we collected 473 data points from 43 developers reporting their amount of wasted time. The collected data were analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative techniques, including thematic and statistical analysis.

Results: Our results show that the occurrence of TD is associated with a lack of progress and waste of time. This might have a negative influence on developers’ morale. Further, management of TD seems to have a positive influence on developers’ morale.

Conclusions: The results highlight the effects TD has on practitioners’ software work. This study presents results indicating that software suffering from TD reduces developers’ morale and thereby also their productivity. However, our results also indicate that TD management increases developers’ morale and developer productivity.

Technical Debt Management

Technical Debt

Human Factors

Software Productivity

Software Development

Developer Morale

Author

Terese Besker

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Software Engineering (Chalmers)

Hadi Ghanbari

Aalto University

Antonio Martini

University of Oslo

Jan Bosch

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Software Engineering (Chalmers)

Journal of Systems and Software

0164-1212 (ISSN)

Vol. 167 110586

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Subject Categories

Computer and Information Science

Software Engineering

DOI

10.1016/j.jss.2020.110586

More information

Latest update

5/27/2020