Towards a Theory of Technical Debt Ownership: An Exploratory Field Study

In recent years, Technical Debt (TD) has received a significant amount of attention from research and practice due to its critical impacts on the software industry. Along similar lines as financial debt, the metaphor of TD explains the consequences of shortcuts taken or sub-optimal decisions made during the systems development lifecycle to speed up time to market and reduce development costs in the short-term. However, in the long-term,
since TD has a negative influence on system quality, it may lead to a significant amount of extra maintenance costs. Despite its significant importance, especially with regard to information systems development (ISD), TD has been almost completely neglected by IS research. In addition, even in the software engineering discipline where TD has received a considerable amount of attention, there is a lack of research on TD ownership to explain who must be accountable for taking on TD. As a first step to address this gap, we conducted an exploratory field study and collected interview and survey data from software professionals active across industrial domains. Using the Accountability Theory as a lens, we first confirmed the relationships among perceived accountability and occurrence of TD. Next, we performed Qualitative Comparative Analysis(QCA)to explore
the presence and absence of factors leading to perceived accountability. Our study extends the accountability theory by applying it in an ISD context to examine TD ownership. We also use our QCA findings to uncover reasons behind the failure of firms to address developers’ expectation of evaluation which leads to TD. Our paper provides insights to managers and organizations that seek to improve resource investments for managing TD and avoiding low software quality.