Environmental Factors Influencing Individual Decision-Making Behavior in Software Project: A Systematic Literature Review

As one of the crucial human aspects, individual decision-making behavior that may affect the quality of a software project is adaptive to the environment in which the individual is. However, no comprehensive reference framework of the environmental factors influencing individual decision-making behavior in software projects is presently available. This paper undertakes a systematic literature review (SLR) to gain insight into existing studies on this topic. After a careful SLR process, 40 studies were targeted to solve this question. Based on these extracted studies, we first provided a taxonomy of environmental factors comprising eight categories. Then a total of 237 factors are identified and classified using these eight categories, and some major environmental factors of each category are listed in the paper. The environmental factors listing and the taxonomy can help researchers and practitioners to better understand and predict the behavior of individuals during decision making and to design more effective solutions to improve people management in software projects

Increasing Distributed IT&C Application Security

The development of distributed IT & C applications – DIA is presented alongside their main characteristics and the actors involved in activities through-out their lifecycle are identified in the before-mentioned scope. Aspects pertaining security risks, as well as methods of enhancing security, are detailed by DIA architectural features. The analysis includes risk elements, vulnerabilities, means of enhancing the behavior of the system, as well as a hierarchical feature dependency model based on a qualitative assessment of DIA security features, obtained through an inquiry in the common means of protection used by Romanian professionals, as well as their prioritization in the context of limited resources. A graph-based model of feature interactions is built. The last section deals with the ways of improving risk detection methods, as derived from the answers and features presented

Dealing with unpredictable risk - The influence of external factors on information systems development and implementations

Organisations and especially Government departments develop information systems for their own specific needs, due to this Government departments invests a great deal in information systems development and implementation projects. The intention is to save on cost and develop information systems according to their needs and requirements. Unfortunately such projects are vulnerable and subject to a range of risks. This case study identifies the risk factors involved in information systems development and implementation projects and the risk processes that are in place to mitigate against those risk factors. Furthermore the case study investigates an information systems development and implementation project where four legacy systems were to be merged into one newly developed system. The project was interrupted when an organisational merger resulted in the loss of key members of the governance board and the project team, either through redundancy or being allocated other responsibilities within the organisation. This exposed the project to unpredictable risk which caused the project to head down the path of possible failure. The case study outlines the project plan, what actually happened and what according to the interviewed participants happened during the project. It is clear that the risk management processes wasn't followed and that wrongful decisions were made during the organisational merger. Unpredictable risks as a result of the merger and the decision to continue the project required a strong governance board, proper project management, proper risk management and the execution of the risk management processes. The lack of governance and project management had a huge impact on the project while the loss of expertise and knowledge added to the risk profile which resulted in further complications to the project. It’s during these situation that a strong governance board and proper project management is needed to make those critical decisions and steer the project towards success

Pricing e-service quality risk in financial services

a b s t r a c t E-service quality is crucial for differentiating e-commerce offers and gaining competitive advantage. Eservice quality risk is the risk that a firm's e-service quality will drop, or improve, relative to competitors. There is evidence that benchmark ratings of e-service quality that are published regularly by third-parties can impact the market value of rated firms. Firms therefore continue investing in IT-related determinants of e-service quality. However, they do so without knowing: (1) the cost or return associated with a unit relative deterioration, or improvement in e-service quality ratings, and (2) how this cost or return may vary across firms. To answer these questions, we adapt a well-established financial risk pricing approach for the case of pricing a single idiosyncratic IT investment risk, where an event study is used to generate the market data needed to price ris

Investigating the relationship between software process improvement, situational change, and business success in software SMEs

While we have learned a great deal from Software Process Improvement (SPI) research to date, no earlier study has been designed from the outset to examine the relationship between SPI and business success in software development small- to- medium- sized companies (software SMEs). Since business processes are generally acknowledged as having an important role to play in supporting business success, it follows that the software development process (a large and complex component of the overall business process) has an important contribution to make in supporting business success in software development companies. However, to date we have very little evidence regarding the role of SPI in supporting business success, especially for software SMEs. The need for SPI is dependent on the extent of situational change in a software development setting, and therefore any examination of the relationship between SPI and business success would be deficient if it did not also examine the extent of situational change. Therefore, this thesis describes a novel approach to examining SPI, situational change and business success in software development companies. Furthermore, having discharged this new approach to 15 software SMEs, this thesis makes the important new discovery that the amount of SPI implemented in a software SME is positively associated with the extent of business success – especially when the degree of situational change is taken into account. This thesis describes the first published study to examine the relationship between SPI, situational change and business success in software SMEs. The findings suggest that there are business benefits to implementing SPI in software SMEs, with the degree of situational change being an important factor informing SPI initiatives. Furthermore, this research has yielded valuable new insights into the nature of SPI, situational change and business success in software SMEs