The impact of technical debt on stress : A case study of a large Swedish company

Sammanfattning

Context: Technical debt, the process of introducing sub-optimal so-lutions for short-term profit at the expense of long-term effectiveness,is a new and upcoming research field and has been shown in multiplestudies to affect different human aspects, such as moral and affectivestates. Objectives: The aim of this study is to investigate how technicaldebt impacts stress in both developers and project managers. Methods: The study consisted of two main parts, one literature re-view and one case study. The case study consisted of semi-structuredinterviews with 11 participants which were then thematically analyzed. Results: The results show that technical debt which directly impactsthe efficiency and performance of the developers has a negative impacton stress, which the study found to primarily consist of test debt andcode debt. It also suggests that project managers are generally lessimpacted by technical debt and are more liberal towards introducingit to the system. Conclusions: The study found that developers are more directlyimpacted by technical debt and are, hence, more critical towards itsintroduction. Project managers, on the other hand, are impacted byit to a lesser degree and therefore, in combination with the pressuresand requirements by the customer, prefers a “good enough” solutionover a perfect solution.