Abstract:
In software industry, every software organization faces technical and non-technical
issues during software project development. Every software organization has aim to
build software project under time, cost and with required quality goals. Due to technical
and non-technical issues software project success criteria are affected and ultimately to
software project failure.
In this study, we explored the non-technical issues in each software development phase
and identified the factors that cause software project failure. For this purpose, we
divided our study into two parts. In first part of study, we conducted interviews with
software expert for exploring non-technical issues in each phase of software
development using exploratory research technique. On the basis of experts opinions,
we proposed hypotheses and design questionnaires. In the second part of the study, we
conducted survey in 30 different software organization located in Pakistan’s capital
region. After survey, we analysed the responses and documented the result.
In this study, we found that non-technical issues (communication, understandability
and political issues) prevailing in each software organization. Communication,
understanability and political issues are those issues that affect software project and
ultimately to software project failure. If these issues were managed properly affect
software project. We linked these issue with software project failure in each software
development phase. For this purpose we used correlation and logistic regression
techniques to measure the association and causation between non-technical issues and
software project failure in each software development phase.
After statistical analysis we found that understandability issues affect the undertaken
software project in designing and coding phase only and it has no significantly effect
in other phases of software development. Communication issues affect all phases of
software development while political issues significantly affect software project in
testing phase. We also found higher correlation between software project failure and
communication issues.
