Success Of Software Projects Research Articles

Looking for the Holy Grail of Software Development

The history of software engineering has been marked by many famous project failures documented in papers, articles, and books. This pattern of lack of success has prompted the creation of dozens of software analysis, requirements definition, design methods, programming languages, software development environments, and software development processes all promoted as solving "the software problem." What we hear less about are software projects that were successful. This article reports on the findings of an extensive analysis of successful software projects that have been reported in the literature. It discusses the different interpretations of success and extracts the characteristics that successful projects have in common. These characteristics provide software project managers with an agenda of topics to be addressed that will help ensure, not guarantee, that their software project will be successful.

Managing Software Project Risks (Design Phase) with Proposed Fuzzy Regression Analysis Techniques with Fuzzy Concepts

This Regardless how much effort we put for the success of software projects, many software projects have very high failure rate. Risk is not always avoidable, but it is controllable. The aim of this paper is to present the new mining technique that uses the fuzzy multiple regression analysis techniques with fuzzy concepts to managing the risks in a software project and reducing risk with software process improvement. Top ten software risk factors in design phase and thirty risk management techniques were presented to respondents. The results show that all risks in software projects were important in software project manager perspective, whereas all risk management techniques are used most of time, and often. However, these mining tests were performed using fuzzy multiple regression analysis techniques to compare the risk management techniques to each of the software risk factors to determine if they are effective in mitigating the occurrence of each software risk factor by using statistical package for the Social Science (SPSS) for Manipulating and analyzing the data set, MATLAB 7.12.0 (R2011a), wolfram mathematic 9.0,. Also ten top software risk factors were mitigated by using risk management techniques except Risk 3 “Developing the Wrong User Interface”. We referred the risk management techniques were mitigated on software risk factors in Table XV. The study has been conducted on a group of software project managers. Successful project risk management will greatly improve the probability of project success

A Negotiation Framework for Managing the Requirements Changes

Abstract The consistent system requirements set is the basis of successful software projects. The requirements change is very usual in a software project, and it may cause inconsistency of the requirements set, and become the key factor that affects the quality of the requirements and the software. Aiming at the problem of requirements inconsistencies caused by the requirements change, this paper proposes a compromise-based negotiation framework to manage the requirements changes, illustrates the efficiency of the proposed method by a software engineering case, gives a contrast experiment with the current mainstream method, and finally gives a comparison with the related work and a conclusion. The experimental results show that the framework proposed in this paper is more flexible and accurate than the results of the current popular framework, so it is more suitable for the requirement changes management.

What makes computational open source software libraries successful?

Software is the backbone of scientific computing. Yet, while we regularly publish detailed accounts about the results of scientific software, and while there is a general sense of which numerical methods work well, our community is largely unaware of best practices in writing the large-scale, open source scientific software upon which our discipline rests. This is particularly apparent in the commonly held view that writing successful software packages is largely the result of simply 'being a good programmer' when in fact there are many other factors involved, for example the social skill of community building. In this paper, we consider what we have found to be the necessary ingredients for successful scientific software projects and, in particular, for software libraries upon which the vast majority of scientific codes are built today. In particular, we discuss the roles of code, documentation, communities, project management and licenses. We also briefly comment on the impact on academic careers of engaging in software projects.

A HYBRID INTELLIGENT MODEL FOR SOFTWARE COST ESTIMATION

Accurate software development effort estimation is critical to the success of software projects. Altho ugh many techniques and algorithmic models have been developed and implemented by practitioners, accurate software development effort prediction is still a c hallenging endeavor in the field of software engine ering, especially in handling uncertain and imprecise inpu ts and collinear characteristics. In this study, a hybrid intelligent model combining a neural network model integrated with fuzzy model (neuro-fuzzy model) has been used to improve the accuracy of estimating sof tware cost. The performance of the proposed model i s assessed by designing and conducting evaluation wit h published project and industrial data. Results ha ve shown that the proposed model demonstrates the ability of improving the estimation accuracy by 18% bas ed on the Mean Magnitude of Relative Error (MMRE) criterion.

An Assessment of the Role of Risk Management Practices in Core Banking Software Project Success: A Case of Commercial Banks in Kenya

Core Banking Software Change project in a bank is a project that is very costly and very delicate such that its success emerges the top most priority for the organization that is undergoing the change. There is need for business continuity, data integrity and customer service value addition from the product of the project. This study sought to establish the role of risk management practices towards enhancing project success in commercial banks in Kenya during Core Banking Software Change. Given its complexity, therefore, it would be paramount to establish the existing risk management practices in the local banking sector. This study sought to assess these practices with regard to risk identification, risk analysis and risk response and control. The researcher used survey research design and the target population was 14 banks that have changed their Core Banking Software in the last five years (2007-2013) based in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city. A sample size of 7 banks was taken consisting of Project Managers, System Owner and Super Users as respondents. Data was the analyzed qualitatively using statistical representations such as percentages and graphs. The study revealed that most commercial banks in Kenya employ risk management practices during Core Banking Software Project implementation and most respondents believed that Risk Management is a major contributor to project success. Project success is the outcome of a personal, individual evaluation of project characteristics by each stakeholder. This may include objectively measurable characteristics such as time, money and requirements, but may also include other characteristics such as stakeholder satisfaction and the future potential of the project result (Koningsveld & Mertens, 1992). This study recommends that banks need to adopt an integrated project risk management tool to be used by the project team during the whole project cycle. This research also recommends the introduction of a prototype risk decision support tool which banks can use in decision making during the implementation of a project. These recommendations are expected to enhance project success through delivery in time, within the established budgets and at the expected quality.

Observatory and Participatory Project Factors for Software Projects

The success of the software project is measured in terms of attainments of its success. To ensure the success, the software process must be mature enough to produce trustworthy software and also fulfil requirements according to the needs of the users. Hence, in literature review numerous software project factors have been identified. This paper evaluates the project factors by categorizing it in participatory and observatory factors. Therefore, it is deemed essential to perceive evocative legends to these factors by quantifying them. The identification of these factors plays an important role in successful software project completion.

Organizing knowledge workforce for specified iterative software development tasks

Organizing knowledge workers for specific tasks in a software development process is critical for the success of software projects. Assigning workforce in software projects represents a dynamic and complex problem that concerns the utilization of cross-trained knowledge workers who possess different productivities and error tendencies in coding and defect correction. This complexity is further compounded when the development process follows a software release life cycle and involves major releases of alpha, beta, and final versions in the context of iterative software development. We study this knowledge workforce problem from three essential project management perspectives: (1) timeliness — obtaining shortest development time; (2) effectiveness — satisfying budget constraint; and (3) efficiency — achieving high workforce utilization. We explore ideal workforce composites with two strategic focuses on productivity and quality and with different scenarios of workload ratios. An analytical model is formulated and a meta-heuristic approach based on particle swarm optimization is used to derive solutions in a simulation experiment. Our findings suggest that forming an ideal workforce composite is a non-trivial task and task assignments with divergent focuses for software projects under different workload scenarios require different planning strategies. Practical implications are drawn from our findings to provide insight on effectively planning workforce for software projects with specific goals and considerations.

English

Release management has an essential role in the success of large software projects and there is no doubt that correct and efficient management of producing a new release can help the quality of the product and the satisfaction of the customers to a great extent. However, there is still problem in many companies for generating a new release, despite all the necessary resources like human, financial, and time resources, sometimes a new release has a lower quality than the older ones. This can be because of the lack of management in release planning. This research shows some possible challenges that can affect management of software release projects. In other words, the study investigates what issues need to be strengthened in management of release for a better release in software companies. This study is an exploration of software projects in small companies in Malaysia. This research was conducted to investigate and understand effective challenges in release management that have been identified by effective role players in release management within software domain. In this paper, developers and managers of eleven small software companies in Malaysia were interviewed to find out the important challenges that affect release management. The study found some important challenges such as: types of release, automation of release planning, tools, foreseeing new releases, release managers, proper understating of requirements and release policy. These are important in release management and their improvement has great effect in release management, which leads to a successful release.   Key words: Release managements, release planning, challenges.

LMES: A localized multi-estimator model to estimate software development effort

Accurate estimation of software development effort is strongly associated with the success or failure of software projects. The clear lack of convincing accuracy and flexibility in this area has attracted the attention of researchers over the past few years. Despite improvements achieved in effort estimating, there is no strong agreement as to which individual model is the best. Recent studies have found that an accurate estimation of development effort in software projects is unreachable in global space, meaning that proposing a high performance estimation model for use in different types of software projects is likely impossible. In this paper, a localized multi-estimator model, called LMES, is proposed in which software projects are classified based on underlying attributes. Different clusters of projects are then locally investigated so that the most accurate estimators are selected for each cluster. Unlike prior models, LMES does not rely on only one individual estimator in a cluster of projects. Rather, an exhaustive investigation is conducted to find the best combination of estimators to assign to each cluster. The investigation domain includes 10 estimators combined using four combination methods, which results in 4017 different combinations. ISBSG, Maxwell and COCOMO datasets are utilized for evaluation purposes, which include a total of 573 real software projects. The promising results show that the estimate accuracy is improved through localization of estimation process and allocation of appropriate estimators. Besides increased accuracy, the significant contribution of LMES is its adaptability and flexibility to deal with the complexity and uncertainty that exist in the field of software development effort estimation.

Views on software engineering from the twin peaks of requirements and architecture

The disciplines of requirements engineering (RE) and software architecture (SA) are fundamental to the success of software projects. Even though RE and SA are often considered in isolation, drawing a line between RE and SA is neither feasible nor reasonable as requirements and architectural design impact each other. This observation motivated the Twin Peaks model that was the subject of the Second International Workshop on the Twin Peaks of Requirements and Architecture (TwinPeaks@ICSE 2013). TwinPeaks@ICSE 2013 was held in conjunction with the 35th International Conference on Software Engineering 2013 in San Francisco, CA. The workshop aimed at providing a forum for researchers, practitioners and educators from the areas of RE and SA to discuss their experiences, forge new collaborations, and explore innovative solutions that address the challenges that occur when relating RE and SA. The workshop provided participants with an opportunity to become familiar with the relationship between RE and SA in the broader context of software engineering, rather than in an isolated context of either RE or SA. The workshop featured one industrial keynote, five research paper presentations, two invited talks and four working group discussions.

Which Model is best for the Software Project? &quotA Comparative Analysis of Software Engineering Models"

Software development methodology (SDLC) in software engineering is a framework that is used to structure plan and control the process of developing an important system. Choosing the right SDLC methodology for your project is as important to the success of the project. Today all live in the era of computer technology. This paper also identity the basic problems in the spiral, waterfall, and iterative models. These models has own advantages and disadvantages. This research paper compare all four models on the basis of some key points which will be helpful to develop a successful software project with the help of comparison any one can select his/her own type of model for his/her project development.

Performing and analyzing non-formal inspections of entity relationship diagram (ERD)

Designing and understanding of diagrammatic representations is a critical issue for the success of software projects because diagrams in this field provide a collection of related information with various perceptual signs and they help software engineers to understand operational systems at different levels of information system development process. Entity relationship diagram (ERD) is one of the main diagrammatic representations of a conceptual data model that reflects users’ data requirements in a database system. In today's business environment, the business model is in a constant change which creates highly dynamic data requirements which also requires additional processes like modifications of ERD. However, in the literature there are not many measures to better understand the behaviors of software engineers during designing and understanding these representations. Hence, the main motivation of this study is to develop measures to better understand performance of software engineers during their understanding process of ERD. Accordingly, this study proposes two measures for ERD defect detection process. The defect detection difficulty level (DF) measures how difficult a defect to be detected according to the other defects for a group of software engineers. Defect detection performance (PP) measure is also proposed to understand the performance of a software engineer during the defect detection process. The results of this study are validated through the eye tracker data collected during the defect detection process of participants. Additionally, a relationship between the defect detection performance (PP) of a software engineer and his/her search patterns within an ERD is analyzed. Second experiment with five participants is also conducted to show the correlation between the proposed metric results and eye tracker data. The results of experiment-2 also found to be similar for DF and PP values. The results of this study are expected to provide insights to the researchers, software companies, and to the educators to improve ERD reasoning process. Through these measures several design guidelines can be developed for better graphical representations and modeling of the information which would improve quality of these diagrams. Moreover, some reviewing instructions can be developed for the software engineers to improve their reviewing process in ERD. These guidelines in turn will provide some tools for the educators to improve design and review skills of future software engineers.

Software Project Scheduling Techniques: a Comparison Study

Project Management tools are considered very important for the success of software projects. Moreover, there are different Software projects scheduling methods that project managers can follow in order to estimate the duration of Software projects. This research discusses the main distribution methods such as Uniform, Beta, Triangular and Gaussian. Moreover, it provides a comparison between them through a simulation experiment. The simulation experiment is conducted using a special software that was developed for the purpose of this study.

A survey study of critical success factors in agile software projects in former Yugoslavia IT companies

Determining the factors that have an influence on the success of the software development projects has been the focus of extensive research for more than 30 years. In recent years agile methodology of software development has become the dominant one for all kinds of software development projects. In this paper we present the results of empirical study for determining critical factors that influence the success of agile software projects which we conducted among senior developers and project managers from IT companies located in the former Yugoslavia countries within South Eastern Europe (SEE) region. This study is inspired by the similar study conducted 5 years ago (Chow and Cao, 2008). With this study we were not able to confirm the model developed in the previous study. Moreover it disconfirmed not only part of the factors, but very much questioned the whole scheme. However, we were able to shed additional light regarding agile software development in former Yugoslavia countries from SEE region as a reference region for investigating outsourced projects done in agile way.

Relational Analysis of Software Developer’s Quality Assures

Software engineering approach ensures the quality of software and the delivery of the product on to time to their client. The development process is facing many challenges to optimize the resource and provide the delivery on time. Each phase of the development has its unique functionality. Software development model and the architectural approaches are differ that will creates an impact in the quality of the delivery .however the role and their skill sets are vital role in the developmental process and to meet the deadlines of the development tasks. The developer's skills and the developmental tasks inline to the functional domain and its relational process are determine the quality factors such minimum error, functional correctness and user satisfactory. This research attempted observes the functional process of the development sector and determine the influencing factor and its associative relationship. The data from the industry and its descriptive analysis with the determined factors are discussed as part of the paper. I. Introduction The success factor of any software development system highly depends upon the architecture of the software development model, technical reliability used in it, pre-planning and preparatory works done and the effective implementation of the specified works in a time driven manner along with the developers completion. In the same way Software architecture forms the backbone for building successful software-intensive systems. Architecture largely permits or precludes a system's quality attributes such as performance or reliability. In general, a critical issue in the design and construction of any complex software system is based on its architecture implementation by the developers. The right architecture is the key to software project success. Conversely, the wrong one is a sure road to failure. A good architecture can help ensure that a system will satisfy key requirements in such areas as performance, reliability, portability, scalability, and interoperability. This paper attempted to relate the software architecture and its development model along with the developers role. The developer efficiency and related factors are addressed to develop the model for effective software development process and its metrics. Software development process is a sequence of activities. These activities are dependent with one another in each level. These activities are related in the next phase. It is a chain of activities involved to determine the resource allocation, utilization and coating process. These relationship activities are used to determine the software process reusability and maintenance. This dependent and independent activities are varies as per the architecture in the software model of development phases. This research process tinted to determine the dependent and regression process values to identify the model and architecture. These create an effect in the cost, development, resource identification and optimization etc. II. Software Engineering Measures

Improving software testing process: feature prioritization to make winners of success‐critical stakeholders

SUMMARYFor a successful software project, acceptable quality must be achieved within an acceptable cost, demonstrating business value to customers and satisfactorily meeting delivery timeliness. Testing serves as the most widely used approaches to determine that the intended functionalities are performed correctly and achieve the desired level of services; however, it is also a labor‐intensive and expensive process during the whole software life cycle. Most current testing processes are often technique‐centered, rather than organized to maximize business value. In this article, we extend and elaborate the ‘4+1’ theoretical lenses of Value‐based Software Engineering (VBSE) framework in the software testing process; propose a multi‐objective feature prioritization strategy for testing planning and controlling, which aligns the internal testing process with value objectives coming from customers and markets. Our case study in a real‐life business project shows that this method allows reasoning about the software testing process in different dimensions: it helps to manage the testing process effectively and efficiently, provides information for continuous internal software process improvement, and increases customer satisfaction, which makes winners of all success‐critical stakeholders (SCSs) in the software testing process. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Knowledge of IT Project Success and Failure Factors

Traditionally, project success/failure is considered only after the project is completed or cancelled. Integrating project success and failure factors knowledge and software engineering activities would result in a situation where project success/failure is considered as part of the development process, leading to more successful software projects. This article aims to identify the common issues responsible for IT projects’ success/failure to develop a deeper understanding of these root causes. Knowledge about success can be used to understand failure and vice versa. Therefore, generic taxonomies of the root causes are developed for that purpose. Knowledge of these taxonomies is integrated into software development and management activities to help software developers and project managers complete projects successfully.

Towards a Formal Specification Framework for Manufacturing Execution Systems

Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) optimize production and business processes at the same time. However, the engineering and specification of MES is a challenging, interdisciplinary process. Especially IT and production experts with different views and background have to cooperate. For successful and efficient MES software projects, misunderstandings in the specification process have to be avoided. Therefore, textual specifications need to be complemented by unambiguous graphical models, reducing the complexity by integrating interdisciplinary views and domain specific terms based on different background knowledge. Today's modeling notations focus on the detailed modeling of a certain domain specific problem area. They do not support interdisciplinary discussion adequately. To bridge this gap a novel MES Modeling Language (MES-ML) integrating all necessary views important for MES and pointing out their interdependencies has been developed. Due to its formal basis, comparable and consistent MES-models can be created for specification, standardization, testing, and documentation of MES software. In this paper, the authors present the formal basis of the modeling language and its core notation. The application of MES-ML is demonstrated taking a yogurt production as an example. Finally, the authors give some evaluation results that underline the effectiveness and efficiency of this new modeling approach with reference to four applications in industrial MES-projects in the domain of discrete and hybrid manufacturing.

Training Soft Skills to Project Managers An Experience Report

The success of software projects is driven by the magical triangle between time, budget, and quality. While short term thinking focuses on time and budget, it is quality that has the most important impact on long term customer satisfaction. Thus, providing good quality software is crucial for success. Quality is influenced by several factors. It depends on the entire software development process and related activities (e.g., requirements management, configuration management, design controls, etc.). However, quality cannot be forced from outside. It is well known, but often forgotten, that it is the team and its relation to the project manager that decides on success or failure of a project. Improving the skills of the project managers improves the quality of the products. The limiting factor usually is not related to technical skills that can be trained quite easily. In fact, project management is all about communication and leadership competencies which are far more difficult (but not impossible) to train. In this paper, the author reports on experiences with this kind of training from an industrial point of view. In particular, the author describes what was most helpful and where the major difficulties lay.