Explaining over-requirement in software development projects: An experimental investigation of behavioral effects

Developing software beyond customer needs and plans: an exploratory study of its forms and individual-level drivers

“…Emotional attachment is defined as an emotion-laden targetspecific bond between a person and a specific object (Thomson et al, 2005). Reliance on past experiences is here defined as using knowledge gained in previous projects as reference information to make decisions about the current initiative (Shmueli et al, 2015). 4 Software development projects are naturally characterized by heterogeneous levels of uncertainty and volatility.…”

“…Their preference derives from inferring functional benefits from concrete product attributes, even irrelevant ones, and from the social benefits provided by advanced products, e.g., eliciting others' positive impressions of the buyer's skills. Shmueli et al (2015; focus instead on the individual traits of developers. They find that the more emotionally attached developers are to the new software creation, the greater the value that they will attribute to a feature they specify and the more likely superfluous features will be included in the product scope.…”

“…For cognition, we focus on the fundamental thinking styles, intuitive and rational, that a laboratory experiment by Eliens et al (2018) has investigated as drivers of escalation of commitment, a BPE-related phenomenon. The also experimental works by Shmueli et al (2015; inspired us to examine the role of emotional attachment, for affection, and of reliance on past project experiences, as behaviour. In this study, we offer arguments to support the existence of associations between these developers' traits and excess forms.…”

“…BNE can manifest in multiple, overlapping ways. It can relate to the decisions of which features to include in the scope of the software system, of how many and how capable the included features are (Shmueli et al, 2015). Some features are core because they are currently required by the market and thus their inclusion in the scope is necessary to add value to users and so for the product's commercial success.…”

“…They might describe the products they are working on as "their babies" (Gino and Pisano, 2008) and see them as part of their extended selves (Belk and Coon, 1993). Shmueli et al (2015) show that emotional attachment is stronger when developers have specified and designed the new product themselves. Also, the more difficult the development tasks are, the stronger the psychological-ownership feelings towards the software being developed.…”