The Dark Side of Emotional Involvement in Software Development: A Behavioral Economics Perspective

Research on information systems and software engineering has often neglected behavioral effects, which may play a role in decision making on software development. The current study addresses this issue by empirically investigating the behavioral roots of over-requirement in the context of a software development project via an experiment. The negative phenomenon of over-requirement refers to specifying a software system beyond the actual needs of the customer or the market, which overload the system with unneeded features. The research question addressed here is whether over-requirement is due in part to the emotional involvement of developers with the software features they developed because of behavioral effects. Previous studies have demonstrated that under the endowment, I-designed-it-myself, and IKEA effects, people become emotionally involved and overvalue physical items that they respectively possess, self-design, or self-create. The findings of our experiment show that participants over-valued features they were assigned to be responsible for, to specify, or to construct, thereby confirming that the three behavioral effects play a role in software development decisions and affect over-requirement. Thus, the study contributes to software development research and practice from the behavioral economics perspective, highlighting the roots of over-requirement.