Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1243-3335
Date of Award
12-16-2020
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Computer Information Systems
First Advisor
Dr. Mark Keil
Second Advisor
Dr. Lars Mathiassen
Third Advisor
Dr. Likoebe Maruping
Fourth Advisor
Dr. Narayan Ramasubbu
Fifth Advisor
Dr. Yolande Chan
Abstract
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.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.57709/20443227
Recommended Citation
Boodraj, Maheshwar, "Managing Technical Debt in Agile Software Development Projects." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2020.
doi: https://doi.org/10.57709/20443227
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