article1380714134_Nasir and Sahibuddin - Scientific...

Scientific Research and Essays Vol. 6(10), pp. 2174-2186, 18 May, 2011
Available online at
DOI: 10.5897/SRE10.1171
ISSN 1992-2248 ©2011 Academic Journals
Full Length Research Paper
Critical success factors for software projects: A
comparative study
Mohd Hairul Nizam Nasir
1
* and Shamsul Sahibuddin
2
1
Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya, Malaysia.
2
Advanced Informatics School, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Malaysia.
Accepted 16 February, 2011
Although there have been studies completed on the critical success factors of software projects, these
studies all have been specific to one particular country. There has been no comprehensive study
reporting on different project sizes in various domains and in multiple countries. We present our
extensive literature survey of critical success factors that impact software projects. Forty-three articles
from the years 1990 to 2010 were found to be significant contributions that could be analysed in order to
develop a list of critical factors that specifically affect the success of software projects. The method of
content analysis and frequency analysis was adopted. Twenty-six critical success factors were found to
be related to software project success. We suggest that organisation or project manager is attentive to
control the top five critical factors to drive towards project success since the percentage of frequency of
occurrences for each is more than 50%. Also, it appears that non-technical factors (94%) dominated
over technical factors (6%). In a result unique to our study compared with previous one, we found that
the factors of clear and frozen requirements, realistic estimation of the schedule and budget, along with
a competent project manager are the five most critical success factors of software projects.
Key words: Critical success factors, software project management, comparative study, project failure, project
success.
INTRODUCTION
The term ‘Software Engineering’ was first coined at the
first NATO Software Engineering Conference in Germany
in 1968 (Naur and Randell, 1969), and there was
widespread consensus that there were problems with
software development and maintenance. These problems
were later discussed by Brooks (1975, 1987, 1995), and
he concluded that there is no silver bullet to overcome
this problem. The term ‘Software Crisis’ emerged to
describe the software industry’s inability to provide
customers with high quality products within schedule and
under budget. Hardware costs were dropping while
software costs were rising rapidly. Major computer
system projects were sometimes years late, and the
resulting software was unreliable, hard to maintain and
performed poorly.
Since the 1980s, in the medical field for example,
computers have been designed to help people, and most
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]