Software project process management maturity and project performance: An examination of Taiwan's software companies

Journal of International Information Management, Sep 2017

Researchers and practitioners argue that an inadequate software development process is one critical factor accounting for high project failure rates. a result, the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) was introduced by the Software Engineering Institute as a guideline for advancing project maturity and improving the odds of project success. To investigate the effectiveness of applying the principles of the CMM, a survey was conducted of 196 Information System managers in Taiwan. The results indicate that a more mature software development process reduces the extent of certain risks experienced during the project development and enables better project performance. Managerial implications regarding the CMM are described.

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Software project process management maturity and project performance: An examination of Taiwan's software companies

" Journal of International Information Management: Vol. 11 : Iss. 1 Journal of International Information Management Software project process management maturity and project performance: An examination of Taiwan's software companies Houn-Gee Chen Tsing-Hua University 0 Melody Wu National Huwie Institute of Technology 1 James J. Jiang University of Central Florida , USA Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/jiim Part of the Management Information Systems Commons Recommended Citation SoftwaraJProject Software project process management maturity and project performance: An examination of Taiwan's software companies Melody Wu National Huwei Institute of Technology Hsin-Ginn Hwang National Chung Cheng University Houn-Gee Chen Tsing-Hua University James J. Jiang University of Central Florida Researchers and practitioners argue that an inadequate software development process is one critical factor accounting for high project failure rates. a result, the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) was introduced by the Software Engineering Institute as a guideline for advanc­ ing project maturity and improving the odds of project success. To investigate the effectiveness of applying the principles of the CMM, a survey was conducted of 196 Information System managers in Taiwan. The results indicate that a more mature software development process reduces the extent of certain risks experienced during the project development and enables better project performance. Managerial implications regarding the CMM are described. INTRODUCTION Due to the high software development failure rate and low productivity in the software industry, the Taiwan government in recent years has endeavored to strengthen organizational software development structure. For example, in 1992, the Software Industry Five-Year Devel­ opment Plan was proposed by the Industry Development Bureau (IDE) to help software develop­ ment organizations in Taiwan improve their softwar e development capability. To accomplish this goal, a series of systematic lectures, professional conferences, and technical training courses were provided to software organizations. 57 Journal of International Information Management, Vol. 11 [2002], Iss. 1, Art. 4 Journal^UntemationajTechn^ During the past decade, software investment has grown rapidly worldwide and software project development has become one of the most important targets for many industrial and re­ search initiatives. As information technologies evolve and information system (IS) applications grow in size, complexity, and importance, a solution for improving the software project process has become more and more imperative. Many tools, technologies, and management methods, such as case tools and rapid application development (RAD), have been adopted to guide the management of the software development process over the years (Bandinelli & Fuggetta, 1995; Kuilboer & Ashrafi, 2000) . Even though significant effort and resources have been poured into system development tools, IS project success rates are still low. In large IS development projects, more than 80 per­ cent are excessively late and/or over budget. According toStandish Group International (1995), about 15% of all IS developments never deliver a final product and budget overruns of 100 to 200% are common in IS projects. A follow-up to their study estimates that almost 80,000 projects were cancelled in 1995 (Standish Group, 1996). IS project problems cost U. S. companies and government agencies $145 billion annually.Clearly, there is major concern over software project development as difficulties arecontinually being experienced despite advances in methodologies. Faced with a high failure rate in software projects, IS managers in many organizations are pursuing software process improvements (Deephouse, et al., 1996; Necco. Gordon, & Tsai, 1987; Rivichandran & Rai, 2000) . A software process is a set of activities, methods, practices, and transformations that people use to develop and maintain software and associated products (e.g., design documents, code, test cases, and user manuals). In fact, many IS projects are carried out in an ad hoc fashion without adequate planning, with poor explication of the overall development process, and the lack of a well-established management framework (Rai & Al-Hindi, 2000) . To provide guidelines for IS management to better control the project development process, the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), in collaboration with the U. S. Department of Defense (DoD) and Mitre Corp., recommends a number of key software process improvement (SPI) areas. These are formalized into an evaluative framework called the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) (Paulk, et al., 1993) . Five levels of maturity are identified in the CMM maturity model. The levels rangefrom an initial level to an optimizing level. Initially, success of software projects relies on the skills of individual project manage (...truncated)


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Melody Wu, Hsin-Ginn Hwang, Houn-Gee Chen, James J. Jiang. Software project process management maturity and project performance: An examination of Taiwan's software companies, Journal of International Information Management, 2018, Volume 11, Issue 1,