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

TL;DR

This study explores how technical debt affects software practitioners' emotional states, revealing that design smells influence feelings and that technical debt can cause psychological stress, impacting developer well-being.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence linking technical debt to affective states, highlighting the importance of human factors in technical debt research.

Findings

Design smells impact affective states positively or negatively.

Technical debt activates a broad emotional spectrum among practitioners.

Reactions to technical debt vary with maturity levels.

Abstract

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.