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concerning these characteristics. Furthermore,
suppliers of the organization were interviewed
regarding their opinion about the application of
various software development processes in practice.
From these interviews and literature study, it
became clear that three factors are of significant
importance for software projects: (a) Project Budget,
and (b) Project Duration, and (c) Requirements. The
selection and application of software development
processes have direct impact on these factors. In
turn, these factors also influence the suitability of a
software development process. Although the
influence works both ways, the influence the factors
have on the software development process is crucial
for the framework, especially the influence they
have on the decision of which process to use.
From the three factors mentioned it is possible to
derive characteristics that influence the suitability of
software development processes. To find these
characteristics, three methods were used: literature
research, analysis of lessons learned documents, and
interviews with professionals. Starting from the
three significant factors mentioned, it was possible
to derive a list of characteristics that are supposed to
influence the suitability of software development
processes (Sharon, 2009): please see Table 1.
3.1 Project Budget
Characteristics that are connected to the factor
Project Budget are risk clearness, scope clearness,
stakeholders’ flexibility, and environmental stability.
If the risk and scope are not clear, the project budget
will not be. A significant amount of over budget and
late projects are caused by uncertain boundaries
(Georgiadou, 2003). Furthermore, these characteris-
tics influence the suitability of processes, e.g., the
Spiral model is considerably better at risk mitigation
in comparison to the Waterfall model (Boehm,
1988). The stability of the development environment
is highly important for the project budget. If the
infrastructure and techniques used are unreliable, the
budget becomes unreliable as well. In addition, if the
stakeholder is inflexible, occurring changes are
difficult to apply and budget can be overrun.
3.2 Project Duration
The characteristics that influence the factor Project
Budget are often related to the factor Project
Duration. In addition, another characteristic was
found that only influences Project Duration. This is
the familiarity the project group has with the
application to be developed. Certain projects are
adaptations of already existing software. However,
some projects concern entire new innovative
software applications. If this is the case, more time is
needed for the project group to get familiar with the
domain.
3.3 Requirements
The final factor mentioned above is that of
Requirements. Five characteristics were found that
have influence on or are influenced by this factor.
The first two characteristics are requirements
maturity and expected changes in requirements. For
many software projects, the stability of requirements
is of the utmost importance. Changes at the end or
during the project could cause enormous problems.
The third characteristic is client’s commitment. For
elicitation and collection of explicit and
unambiguous requirements, clients need to be
committed to the project (Dybå, 2008). Furthermore,
for some software development processes, business
partners need to be on site for the entire duration of
the project (Dybå, 2008, Hunt, 2006). The fourth
characteristic is the method of contracting that is
applied. Agile processes are more suitable for
projects in which time and material (where the final
price depends on the time and material spend) is
applied (Paetsch et al., 2003), and for the Waterfall
model fixed pricing (in which the amount of time
and material are dependent on the agreed price) is
more suitable. This is because the two methods
differ in requirements management. Fixed pricing
causes requirements to be frozen, while time and
material do not. The final characteristic is the
flexibility of stakeholders since requirements
management is dependent on their wishes.
3.4 Additional Characteristics
During this research a number of the characteristics
found did not relate to any of the three factors
mentioned before. The first of these characteristics is
team size. Software projects can differ greatly in the
amount of people working on the project. This does
include the stakeholders, the client, and personnel
from the vendors. For some processes, such as agile
processes, small teams are a necessity. Besides, the
Waterfall model, for example, can cope with large
teams because of its intense use of documentation.
The second characteristic, which relates to the
team size, is how good the team relationship is. This
is important in general, but is crucial for agile
methodologies, in which team communication is a
common, encouraged practice.
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