Measuring affective states from technical debt: A psychoempirical software engineering experiment

Journal article, 2021

Context: Software engineering is a human activity. Despite this, human aspects are under-represented in technical debt research, perhaps because they are challenging to evaluate.
Objective: This study’s objective was to investigate the relationship between technical debt and affective states (feelings, emotions, and moods) from software practitioners.
Method: 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. 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. Results: The statistical analysis shows that different design smells (strong indicators of technical debt) negatively or positively impact affective states. Conclusions: We argue that human aspects in technical debt are important factors to consider, as they may result in, e.g., procrastination, apprehension, and burnout.