A SURVEY OF FAILURES IN THE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

Software development is one of the most important worldwide industries and continues to grow. To deal with this challenge, organizations are adopting ever more tools and methodologies. However, software development projects are still failing in meeting time, budget and functional requirements. This study provides insights on the failures faced by software development organizations regarding their processes, the reasons leading to these failures, and initiatives taken to cope with them. A research methodology was used to gather and compare results from a literature review and semi-structured interviews. We learnt that there are more failures in Management activities, although they were not often reported, while failures in Requirements Engineering and Software Testing are less in number but more frequently reported. Lack of communication, lack of time for improvements and appropriate testing, and poor requirements and functionalities specification were the mostly reported failures. Furthermore, we learnt that organizations are not implementing any initiative to address these failures, although they suggested solutions

Context-Aware Digitalization – Adapting solution development to the organizational context of SMEs

In the context of digital transformation, it is mandatory for most organizations to conduct information systems development (ISD) projects as part of their digitalization and business development journey. One reason that many ISD projects fail is lack of knowledge about which ISD method (ISDM) is most suitable for the project at hand and how to adapt it to reflect the respective business development context. These problems especially occur in small and medium enterprises (SMEs), as they often lack specific methodological skills and project governance experience – so they cannot even manage ISD consultancies that promise to support them in their digital transformation. In this conceptual paper, we present the design of a method for selecting and using ISDM for SMEs. It considers both the context dependency and missing project governance skills of SMEs. The main components of the proposed method link the knowledge areas of business development and ISD: business context evaluation, ISDM selection and ISDM management

Fit to Context Matters – Selecting and Using Information Systems Development Methods to Develop Business in Digitalization Contexts

We ponder the relations of software, information systems (IS) and business development methods in the development of digital businesses and in the digitalization of extant businesses. We present our published IS development method (ISDM) framework and its development. The framework is used as the background to reason the relations between the three development layers of digitalization: software, IS and business. We then propose six highly potential areas of future research. In addition, we answer to two research questions also paving the way to future research: is the matching of IS and business development a reasonable proposition, and is the finding of extant literature true, according to which ISDMs are used limitedly in IS development work. We organized two workshops with 21 (14+7) participants to answer these questions. We detected yes and mixed answers. We contribute to research with the empirical findings and the proposed research areas

Proceedings of the 54th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2021

We ponder the relations of software, information systems (IS) and business development methods in the development of digital businesses and in the digitalization of extant businesses. We present our published IS development method (ISDM) framework and its development. The framework is used as the background to reason the relations between the three development layers of digitalization: software, IS and business. We then propose six highly potential areas of future research. In addition, we answer to two research questions also paving the way to future research: is the matching of IS and business development context a reasonable proposition, and is the finding of extant literature true, according to which ISDMs are used limitedly in IS development work. We organized two workshops with 21 (14+7) participants to answer these questions. We detected yes and mixed answers. We contribute to research with the empirical findings and the proposed research areas.</p

Software development project success: perspectives of project managers and developers in a South African bank.

Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.Many researchers have attempted to define software development project success. While common factors have been found, the success of software projects in all industries cannot be judged by the same factors. Success is complex and means different things to different people. This study investigated what factors project managers and software developers, in a South African Bank, believed contributed to software development project success. The reasons why software developers and project managers were investigated were because software developers have a technical background whilst project managers have a business background. There were 41 respondents consisting of six project managers and 35 software developers that answered the questionnaire. Six participants were interviewed: four developers and two project managers. A case study research was adopted for this study. The results showed that there are many significant factors that contribute to success and failure. The study was divided into four categories to investigate the different success factors. These categories were individual, team, organisational and project. The most critical success factor from this study was the projects being strictly according to the on brief. This showed the software being built must fulfil the requirements that were defined in the project brief. The least important success factor was employees having more than ten years of experience. This showed that this group of respondents do not believe that such a high level of experience is directly related to project success. Respondents were also asked what they thought would lead to software project failure. The factor that was considered most significant was not understanding requirements. An individual factor that stood out was the level of skill of the staff. Both groups of employees believe that having the appropriate skills to do one’s job, contributes significantly to the success of a project. The only factors where project managers and developers responded significantly differently were when they were asked about work life balance and job satisfaction. Developers seemed to consider these factors more important than project managers. Project managers and software developers considered the scope and size of a project critical to project success as it ranked as the second most critical factor. Other critical success factors that appeared in the top five were the level of skill of staff, clearly defined business objectives and understanding requirements. This study contributes to existing literature as it shows that success factors that other researchers found cannot be generalized to all individuals, teams, organisations and projects. This study investigated what factors, project managers and software developers in this digital banking business unit considered to contribute to the success of a project. It concluded that there are many factors that contribute to success however, projects being on brief was the most important factor. Even though this study only investigated the views of project managers and software developers, there are other IT professionals that could offer different insights as to what success means to them. This study could therefore be expanded to include business analysts, system analysts and testers