Measuring affective states from architectural technical debt

Abstract

Context: While the technological and financial aspects of technical debt have been extensively researched, the consequences on human aspects remain mostly uncharted. At the same time, recent psychoempirical software engineering research links the affects of software practitioners to organisational performance. Objective: To empirically investigate the causal relationship between architectural technical debt and the affects of software practitioners. Method: A mixed-methods approach with 40 software practitioners from 12 companies was used, combining repeated measurements laboratory experiments and semi-structured interviews. Result: Based on a set of 200 data points, the existence of tiny tangles negatively impacts the valence of software practitioners with more than 99 % certainty. No links were found between professional background and variations in affective state. Moreover, software practitioners receive positive affects from challenging software engineering tasks and negative affects from architectural technical debt and deadlines. Limitation: The subjects were industry professionals obtained through convenience sampling. Additionally, the treatments, albeit similar to industry code, were small and isolated examples that lacked the full spread and severity of technical debt encountered in practice. Conclusion: By combining our results with the existing literature on psychoempirical software engineering, strong arguments can be made in favour of the hypothesis that the effects of technical debt on industry professionals carry high technological and financial risks.