  Background: A preliminary study we conducted showed that software
practitioners respond to requirements changes(RCs) with different emotions, and
that their emotions vary at stages of the RC handling life cycle, such as
receiving, developing, and delivering RCs. Objective: We wanted to study more
comprehensively how practitioners emotionally respond to RCs. Method: We
conducted a world-wide survey with the participation of 201 software
practitioners. In our survey, we used the Job-related Affective Well-being
Scale (JAWS) and open-ended questions to capture participants emotions when
handling RCs in their work and query about the different circumstances when
they feel these emotions. We used a combined approach of statistical analysis,
JAWS, and Socio-Technical Grounded Theory (STGT) for Data Analysis to analyse
our survey data. Findings: We identified (1) emotional responses to RCs, i.e.,
the most common emotions felt by practitioners when handling RCs; (2) different
stimuli -- such as the RC, the practitioner, team, manager, customer -- that
trigger these emotions through their own different characteristics; (3)emotion
dynamics, i.e., the changes in emotions during the project and RC handling life
cycles; (4) distinct events where particular emotions are triggered:project
milestones, and RC stages; (5) and time related matters that regulate the
emotion dynamics. Conclusion: Practitioners are not pleased with receiving RCs
all the time. Last minute RCs introduced closer to a deadline especially
violate emotional well-being of practitioners. We present some practical
recommendations for practitioners to follow, including a dual-purpose
emotion-centric decision guide to help decide when to introduce or accept an
RC, and some future key research directions.
