11/05/2025 | News release | Distributed by Public on 11/05/2025 10:53
Dan Rush, associate professor for information technology management, and Marc Schmalz, assistant professor in information technology management, and their coauthor earned a Top 25% Paper recognition and Best Emergent Research Forum Paper nomination for their research paper "Reexamining software project risk in modern day project contexts," presented at the 2025 America's Conference on Information Systems.
Their study explores a question at the heart of modern software development: do researchers' concepts match the developers' reality? To find out, the team tested a widely used risk-measurement survey in new types of software projects, including game development, where success factors and challenges can look very different from traditional productivity software.
Marc SchmalzDuring pilot testing, they discovered something unexpected: developers' real-world perceptions of risk no longer match the assumptions built into older research models. What scholars have long treated as universal "risk factors" may not apply to today's project environments at all.
By revealing this disconnect, the study challenges long-standing ideas in software project management and opens the door for updated methodologies that actually make sense to the people building modern software.