Abstract
Although there have been studies completed on the critical success factors of software projects, these studies all have been specific to one particular country. There has been no comprehensive study reporting on different project sizes in various domains and in multiple countries. We present our extensive literature survey of critical success factors that impact software projects. Forty-three articles from the years 1990 to 2010 were found to be significant contributions that could be analysed in order to develop a list of critical factors that specifically affect the success of software projects. The method of content analysis and frequency analysis was adopted. Twenty-six critical success factors were found to be related to software project success. We suggest that organisation or project manager is attentive to control the top five critical factors to drive towards project success since the percentage of frequency of occurrences for each is more than 50%. Also, it appears that non-technical factors (94%) dominated over technical factors (6%). In a result unique to our study compared with previous one, we found that the factors of clear and frozen requirements, realistic estimation of the schedule and budget, along with a competent project manager are the five most critical success factors of software projects. Key words: Critical success factors, software project management, comparative study, project failure, project success.
Highlights
The term ‘Software Engineering’ was first coined at the first NATO Software Engineering Conference in Germany in 1968 (Naur and Randell, 1969), and there was widespread consensus that there were problems with software development and maintenance
We suggest that organisation or project manager is attentive to control the top five critical factors to drive towards project success since the percentage of frequency of occurrences for each is more than 50%
The method of content analysis was adopted in this study, rather than the data extraction method or the frequency analysis method alone, because some of the factors described by the authors in the articles were not explicitly clear and required careful reading, understanding and interpretation to produce accurate findings
Summary
The term ‘Software Engineering’ was first coined at the first NATO Software Engineering Conference in Germany in 1968 (Naur and Randell, 1969), and there was widespread consensus that there were problems with software development and maintenance. Successful investigations revealed that defective software was among the various factors leading to this accident (Leveson and Turner, 1993). Another example is the delay of over 16 months in the opening of Denver International Airport and the over 100 million dollars in excess of the budget in the airport’s construction cost (Swartz, 1996). In-depth investigation uncovered that “specification and design errors in the software, and poor analysis and testing of the failed subsystems, were to Benchmark/year Succeeded (%) Challenged (%) Failed (%)
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