A Study to Investigate and Classify CSFs of Agile Software Project

Abstract

Software projects are considered successful if they are completed in time and within budget. Normally in traditional software development, projects get failed because of these factors. To overcome these problems, agile software methodologies came into market formally since last decade. It has enough evidence to say that agile projects are performing better than traditional. Now the need arises to know what factors which were making it successful are and out of these factors, which one are the most important. There are a lot of critical success factors in the literature which are responsible for the success of agile projects related to organization, people. process, project and technical, team and customer dimensions. Researchers have already classified them on different criteria's (time, cost, scope, and quality) to measure the success of software projects. There is limited work on identifying the critical success factors which influence the major dimensions. There is a need to identify, classify and prioritize the factors based on major dimensions which have been mentioned in the literature. This ranking will highlight the importance and ranking of factors which will help the software industry to address them. So, the perception of software engineers is also required to get the best critical success factors. The objective of this study is to identify, classify and then prioritize the critical success factors that influence the success of software development projects using agile methodologies in Pakistan. Delphi approach was used to achieve the objective of the study and the research is coducted in three rounds. The study used a mixed method approach where qualitative data was collected through literature and from the experts of filed through the Delphi process. Later, identified factors were prioritized quantitatively through Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) i.e. multiple-criteria decision analysis approach. The results of our research will be useful for the developers by helping them to identify what factors can be used for the success of software projects.