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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.

The use of risk management methodologies on IT projects is very important, but very little is understood about what drives this use. A review of the literature identified a range of potential drivers of this use, with the notion of use itself being resolved into two types: organizational level adoption and project level adoption and usage. A categorisation scheme based on the source of the driver was also developed. Research questions regarding the adoption of the risk management methodology (RMM) at the organizational level and the adoption and usage of the RMM at the project level were investigated via an interpretive qualitative case study of a financial services organization. Data was collected from semi-structured interviews and corporate documents and analysed using Qualitative Data Analysis. Two drivers, Management Initiative to Improve IT and Management Initiative to Standardise Practices were found to influence the organizational level adoption of RMM within the case-study organization. EUT proved useful in providing a rationale for IT management to adopt the IT Operating Model (and hence the risk management methodology) it could not however capture the circumstances in which the decision to adoption took place, for which Wastell's (2007) notion of ‘methodology as a response to organizational crisis’ proved useful. Seven drivers were found to influence the adoption and usage of the RMM on IT projects within the case-study organization, with Project Manager Experience and Perceived Project Riskiness being the most influential and working together to ensure the ‘right’ level of usage given the risks inherent in a project, with the other drivers interacting to set the ‘minimum’ level to which the RMM must be used. In regard to the project level usage of the RMM, again EUT provide a sound economic argument on which the operation of the drivers could be explained, but as with the organizational level adoption, could not provide an insight nature of that operation. A contingency theory perspective did however provide an explanation of why the primary drivers interact in the way they do, as well explaining why higher risks projects require additional use of the methodology. In addition to the two types of use foreshadowed in the literature, a third type, adaptation of the methodology was found. Three drivers, Management Initiative to Improve IT, Project Community Norms, and Europa Regulatory Environment, were found to influence the adaptation of the Europa's IT project risk management methodology. The role of Communities of Practice proved useful in explaining the adaptation of methodology. This study contributes to the body of knowledge by improving the understanding of what drives the use of risk management methodologies on IT project and providing a detailed exposition of the organization's risk management practices.

An individual’s bad news reporting behavior has been studied from a number of perspectives and has resulted in a variety of research streams including the MUM effect (or reluctance to transmit bad news), whistle-blowing, and organizational silence. While many scholars in different areas have studied reporting behavior, it has not been widely discussed in the information systems literature. This dissertation research addresses an individual’s bad news reporting behavior (and its antecedents) in the troubled IT project context. Many social phenomena are multi-causal (Hollander 1971). The silence phenomenon involved in an individual’s bad news reporting behavior is multi-causal too. While prior research has identified many antecedents to the bad news reporting behavior, it has not provided any systematic approach for categorizing them. In this dissertation, the antecedents are categorized into three different levels: personal factors (i.e., individual-level factors), situational factors (i.e., project-level factors), and organizational factors. This research empirically investigates how the antecedents at different levels affect (i.e., encourage or discourage) an individual’s decision to report or not report bad news in the IT project context. The dissertation follows a multi-paper model, and includes three independent, empirical studies, each with its own research model focusing on personal, situational, and organizational factors.