Konferans bildirisi Açık Erişim

An Empirical Study of Destructive Factors Affecting Development Effort in Software Intensive Projects

2012    Sokmen, Nermin

One of the most important challenges in software projects is to make accurate effort estimation. During the software development process, there are some critical factors having a negative impact over the process. In this study, the performance of software development is measured by project effort deviation quantity and rate. The study evaluated possible factors causing the effort deviations in the software development lifecycle. Some of these factors directly affect the development time and they cause serious performance problems. Factors such as understandability of the existing requirements, new coming requirements, general technical problems, customer-based problems, purchasing problems and staffing volatility are included in this category. Again, some factors indirectly affect development process. These factors are the factors whose effect on project performance cannot be obtained directly from project plans or project team. Factors such as reusing strategy, preliminary preparation studies, competence levels of team members, competence levels of project manager and customer participation are included in this category. Seventy-five pieces of project information were reached from 44 information technology (IT) companies and three IT institutes. At the revision meetings held with the project manager and team members of a completed project, all the activities in the product development life cycle were reviewed according to the plan. The impact of these factors was exposed by the statistical methods. Analysis results show that technical properties, reusing strategy and competence levels of the team affect project effort. An increase is seen in effort deviation quantity and rate in the projects delayed due to existing and new requirements and technical problems. A significant decrease is seen in deviation values of the projects which carry out preliminary preparation works. Both deviation quantity and rate are affected by participation level of the customer. Effort deviation quantity decreases as competence levels of the team and technical experience of the project manager increase. On the other hand, competence levels of the project manager and domain expertise of the teams affect effort deviation rate. Finally, the factors such as staffing volatility, purchasing problems, customer-based problems, reusing existing products are not effective on effort deviation values.