Situational Factors Affecting Software Development Process Selection

Abstract

Context: Within organizations which provide IT, R&D and consulting services to diverse markets, it is common to use different software development processes. It helps organizations to meet the requirements of projects, which focus on different business domains. Herein the challenge is to determine which factors should be considered by project managers, when it comes to choosing appropriate process for each particular project. Objectives: This study aims to evaluate the gap between acquired and deployed technology for selective agile process implementations and identify situational factors (SFs), which influence process selection within organizations. Method: The qualitative semi-structured and spontaneous, informal interviews, literature review, quantitative webbased questionnaire and validation meetings with project managers were used to define and collect necessary data and validate thesis results Results: The result of this thesis work is presented as a table, containing 17 situational factors, which have been identified and grouped under 6 main categories. Moreover, survey results provide adoption rate per every investigated process, serving also as “evidence of match”, proving that right process was chosen for each particular project within companies. Conclusions: It is concluded that it is important to be aware and take into account SFs to get the optimal match between each project-process pair. It can help to increase adoption rate of the process, which was deployed, and use maximum of the benefits, tailored to the specific process.