Reviewing Literature on Time Pressure in Software Engineering and Related Professions - Computer Assisted Interdisciplinary Literature Review

TL;DR

This interdisciplinary literature review analyzes 1270 papers to understand how time pressure affects mental health, highlighting its limited study in software engineering and proposing hypotheses for future research.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of time pressure research across disciplines and identifies gaps in software engineering literature, proposing testable hypotheses for future studies.

Findings

Time pressure is widely studied in various fields.

Limited research on time pressure in software engineering.

Proposed hypotheses for future mental health impact studies.

Abstract

During the past years, psychological diseases related to unhealthy work environments, such as burnouts, have drawn more and more public attention. One of the known causes of these affective problems is time pressure. In order to form a theoretical background for time pressure detection in software repositories, this paper combines interdisciplinary knowledge by analyzing 1270 papers found on Scopus database and containing terms related to time pressure. By clustering those papers based on their abstract, we show that time pressure has been widely studied across different fields, but relatively little in software engineering. From a literature review of the most relevant papers, we infer a list of testable hypotheses that we want to verify in future studies in order to assess the impact of time pressures on software developers mental health.