99-021
THE EFFECTS OF TIME PRESSURE ON QUALITY IN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT: AN AGENCY
MODEL
Robert D. Austin
An agency framework is used to model the behavior of software developers
as they weigh concerns about product quality against concerns about missing
their individual task deadlines. Developers who care about product quality
but also fear the negative career impact of missing deadlines may take
"shortcuts" - by conveniently interpreting requirements, inappropriately
shortening testing, ignoring looming problems, optimistically reporting
status, or otherwise accelerating progress in ways that risk increasing
overall costs. Managers sometimes attempt to reduce this risk by
systematically adjusting estimating or deadline setting policies; a common
method involves adding slack when setting task deadlines, to alleviate
partially the time pressures believed to encourage shortcut taking. This
paper derives a formal relationship between estimating/deadline setting
policies and software product quality; it provides recommendations
concerning how estimates and deadlines might be sent to preserve the
quality of software development products. Specifically it is shown that:
1) Adding slack does not always preserve quality, thus systematically
adding slack to alleviate time pressure is, at best, an incomplete policy
for minimizing costs; 2) Costs can be minimized by adopting
estimating and deadline setting policies that permit estimates of
completion dates and deadlines that are not the same; and 3) Contrary to
casual intuition, shortcut taking can be eliminated by setting deadlines
aggressively, thereby maintaining or even increasing the time pressures
under which developers work.
TOM
48 pages
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