| In challenging economic times, pressure on leaders of software development companies to decrease delivery cycles within diminishing budgets and without compromising quality has mounted. The success of software projects is dependent upon useful software metrics, which create value by providing insight into the complex, software development environments. The purpose of this qualitative interpretive phenomenological study is to explore how software project management lived experiences of software engineers may influence decision-making in the selection of software metrics for managing planning and control of software development and maintenance tasks for project success. A qualitative interpretive phenomenological research method was employed to explore how lived experiences of software engineers can be used to classify software metrics as critical, essential, or redundant to meet organization goals. A purposeful homogeneous sample of 10 senior-level software engineers employed at a local software development company in a major city in southwest U.S. was selected. Data collection consisted of semi-structured, in-depth interviews analyzed through Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis to identify recurrent patterns and themes as relevant to the description of the phenomenon. Five major themes emerged from analysis: (a) intrinsic value of software metrics, (b) adaptive change management, (c) experience-based decision-making, (d) systemic reasons for software project failures, and (e) project size/type, and three minor themes: (a) organizational processes, (b) data-driven decision-making, and (c) customer expectations, emerged from the data analysis. Recommendations for practice included emphasis in defining system requirements to maintain scope boundary conditions; managing, monitoring, and controlling software products and processes instead of focusing primarily on project performance; strengthening relationships between software project decision-makers to facilitate mutual trust; and documenting project lessons learned by software engineers to support decision-making in risk management and contingency planning to alleviate uncertainty and turmoil around change management decisions. Considerations for future research included a qualitative phenomenological study to expand and replicate the current study from more diverse populations to provide more insight into software project management decision-making. Other considerations for future research included a qualitative multiple-case study to further explore experienced-based decision-making and qualitative single-case studies to further explore systemic reasons for software project failures to provide insight into continued software project failures. |
