Assessing the Impractical Expectations of the Software Development Team to Understand Project Failure

This research project sought to determine how it is possible that 80% of software development projects fail while the software development industry contributes to a substantial growth in productivity and proficiency of life. The following is the abstract written for the paper. To request a full copy of the paper, please see the contact page of this site.

Abstract Software development plays a critical role in our society. We rely on its products to make several aspects of our lives easier. In light of this, the majority of software development projects fail with an estimate of only 10-20% considered successful. Traditionally, noted causes for software failures have been described as misunderstandings in requirements, requirement changes, poor estimations of time and costs, and other generic problems in the development cycle. However, the root behind each of these problems is often overlooked. The question of how can we continually create insufficient requirements, need requirement changes, make invalid time and cost

predictions, and make other errors in the development cycle so that we incur failure 80% of the time, begins to tackle the root of the problem. This questions leads to one foundation; Requirements, budgets and time constraints, among others, fall on the responsibilities of the development team. The development team members must adhere to each of the project constraints in order to solidify the project’s success. Hence, in order to gain profound knowledge of software development failure, we must concentrate our efforts on the expectations placed on the development team and determine their validity, significance, and predictability of a project’s success.