> what does software engineering research have to do with emotional psychology, again? Psychology of labor is a thing, and has been for ages. The idea behind i

> what does software engineering research have to do with emotional psychology, again? Psychology of labor is a thing, and has been for ages. The idea behind it is simple: it's people with a mind that do the labor, so their psychological state has influence on the work done. Is it software engineering? No, but the article purports to identify factors that influence the psychological state during software development. That said, I do believe such studies to be of minimal value. Voluntary surveys are absolute bottom of the barrel. Identifying 219 factors from such a study seems like analysis gone mad. The extensive discussion of the non-normality of the central happiness statistic seems a point in case: it's trivially visible, it's not interesting, and doesn't play a role in any further analysis or conclusion. They do remark that the mean value they find is higher than in other studies, but can't explain it. Not that they need to, because nothing would change in the paper if the value had been lower. Basically, this looks like an experiment from a starting PhD, who needs to push out one paper per year. Sadly, it isn't. The authors are senior researchers, who seem to have little idea of psychology.