# Consequences of Unhappiness While Developing Software

## TL;DR

This study explores the negative impacts of unhappiness on software developers, revealing 49 consequences across mental health, development process, and artifacts, and provides a classification scheme to guide future research and practice.

## Contribution

It uncovers and classifies the consequences of unhappiness among developers, expanding understanding beyond productivity and quality to include mental well-being and process impacts.

## Key findings

- Unhappiness affects mental well-being of developers.
- Unhappiness impacts the software development process.
- Unhappiness influences the quality of software artifacts.

## Abstract

The growing literature on affect among software developers mostly reports on the linkage between happiness, software quality, and developer productivity. Understanding the positive side of happiness -- positive emotions and moods -- is an attractive and important endeavor. Scholars in industrial and organizational psychology have suggested that also studying the negative side -- unhappiness -- could lead to cost-effective ways of enhancing working conditions, job performance, and to limiting the occurrence of psychological disorders. Our comprehension of the consequences of (un)happiness among developers is still too shallow, and is mainly expressed in terms of development productivity and software quality. In this paper, we attempt to uncover the experienced consequences of unhappiness among software developers. Using qualitative data analysis of the responses given by 181 questionnaire participants, we identified 49 consequences of unhappiness while doing software development. We found detrimental consequences on developers' mental well-being, the software development process, and the produced artifacts. Our classification scheme, available as open data, will spawn new happiness research opportunities of cause-effect type, and it can act as a guideline for practitioners for identifying damaging effects of unhappiness and for fostering happiness on the job.