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Effect of Sentiment Negativity on Prioritization of Self-Admitted Technical Debt

A controlled vignette experiment showing that negative emotional wording in Self-Admitted Technical Debt descriptions biases developers to assign higher urgency, importance, and effort, with one-third to one-half affected, even though most developers believe using negativity as a priority proxy is unacceptable, exposing a gap between their behavior and their stated norms.

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Noname manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Negativity in Self-Admitted Technical Debt

Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) is a comment in which a developer openly admits that part of a software system is a suboptimal implementation needing future rework; about a quarter of such commen…