Managing Technical Debt in Agile Software Development Projects

One of the key reasons that agile software development methods have gained popularity in recent years is because they enable organizations to produce software quickly to meet the needs of various stakeholders. However, this focus on delivering software quickly often encourages practitioners to incur technical debt – design or implementation constructs that are expedient in the short term but set up a technical context that can make future changes more costly or impossible. Worldwide, technical debt is estimated to be a trillion-dollar problem. This has prompted significant interest from both researchers and practitioners. In this dissertation, I present two essays that advance our knowledge of the causes of technical debt in agile software development projects and that offer potential solutions to manage the most important of these causes of technical debt. In my first essay, I conduct a ranking-type Delphi study of information technology (IT) project managers and software developers to identify and prioritize the most important causes of technical debt in agile software development projects. The findings from this study provide a verified list of 55 causes of technical debt in agile software development projects and offer 13 potential techniques to manage the causes of technical debt that were most important to the IT project managers and software developers in this study. In my second essay, I conduct a randomized experiment to examine the impact of software developers’ construal level, a cognitive process, on the unintentional accumulation of technical debt in software development projects. The findings from this experiment suggest that software developers at a high construal level are more likely to focus on developing the architecture or design than software developers at a low construal level. Collectively, the findings from these two essays deepen our understanding of the intentional and unintentional causes of technical debt in agile software development projects. Further, the findings offer potential techniques to manage the most important causes of technical debt for IT project managers and software developers

Managing Code Debt in Open Source Software Development Projects: A Digital Options Perspective

In this study, we examine the impact of three commonly used digital options on the accumulation of code debt in open source software development (OSSD) projects. Further, we examine the impact of code debt on three measures of OSSD project performance. Specifically, we hypothesize that increased use of defer options and abandon options is negatively related to the accumulation of code debt, while increased use of growth options is positively related to the accumulation of code debt. Further, we hypothesize that while the accumulation of code debt is negatively related to a project’s market success and the engagement of peripheral developers, it is positively related to the engagement of core developers. To test our hypotheses, we plan to collect and analyze project data from a leading OSSD platform. We expect our findings to provide new theoretical perspectives for researchers and actionable insights for software practitioners

Leveraging the Planning Fallacy to Manage Technical Debt in Agile Software Development Projects

One of the primary reasons for using agile software development (ASD) methods is to be agile – to deliver working software quickly. Unfortunately, this pressure often encourages ASD practitioners to make long-term trade-offs for short-term gains (i.e., to accumulate technical debt). Technical debt is a real and significant business challenge. Indeed, a recent study provides a conservative estimate of $361,000 of technical debt for every 100,000 lines of code. In this study, I examine the impact of the planning fallacy – people’s tendency to underestimate the time required to complete a project, even when they have considerable experience of past failures to live up to planned schedules – on the accumulation of technical debt in ASD projects. Using an experiment, I seek to establish a causal relationship between the planning fallacy and technical debt and to demonstrate that solutions to the planning fallacy can be leveraged to manage technical debt in ASD projects

Does the Internet Create Healthier Societies? A Spatial Analysis of Health Outcomes and Internet Access

Smartphones, iPads, wearable technologies, etc. have widespread application to healthcare. Prior research often assumed that having access to broadband technologies relates to equity in access to health-related technologies. While some studies suggest th

Conversational Assistants: Investigating Privacy Concerns, Trust, and Self-Disclosure

By the end of 2017 more than 33 million voice-based devices will be in circulation, many of which will include conversational assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri. These devices require a significant amount of personal information from users to learn their preferences and provide them with personalized responses. This creates an interesting and important tension: the more information users disclose, the greater the value they receive from these devices; however, due to concerns for the privacy of personal information, users tend to disclose less information. In this study, we examine the role of reciprocal self-disclosure and trust within the novel and emerging context of conversational assistants. Specifically, we investigate the effect of conversational assistants’ self-disclosure on the relationship between users’ privacy concerns and their self-disclosure. Further, we explore the mechanism through which self-disclosure by conversational assistants influences this relationship, namely, the role of cognitive trust and emotional trust