Empirical Research On Critical Success Factors For Software Development Project

Today, while China Software Industry is entering into a low-speed development period, the Software Companies are being challenged by weaker demand from the market, and faced with many development opportunities, such as the strong growth in consumer demand for the information, the increasing investment of informatization technology, and the high-speed growth emerging fields. However the failure rate of the domestic software development projects have been persistently high, and there are so many factors which are affecting the high performance implementation of the projects, therefore the project team need to understand the critical success factors affecting the project performance and their impact in order to take effective management for promoting the software development projects.This research used the mixed methods of the theoretical and empirical research. First, with a review of the conclusion of the research about the software project management, project performance and the theory of critical success factors in the domestic and foreign academia, Second, based on learning and summarizing the existing research results, combined with own characteristics and processes of software development projects, the following seven factors affecting the software project performance were extracted which are project objectives plan, the arrangement of plan implementation, the management of project changes, the comprehensive abilities of project manager, senior management support, communication management, and incentive systems, also the following six evaluation indexes of software project performance are extracted which are product reliability, product operability, customer satisfaction, cost control, project period, and passion for works. On the basis of above research, the theoretical model of critical success factors for software development project and project performance was built, and also the assumption was made. Finally, with the empirical analysis, the empirical research on critical success factors for software development project was carried out through the data of questionnaire survey.This research find that there is a significant positive correlation between the software development project performance and following factors which are project objectives plan, the arrangement of plan implementation, the management of project changes, the comprehensive abilities of project manager, senior management support, communication management, and incentive systems. And the highest positive impact on project performance is following factors which are project objectives plan, the arrangement of plan implementation, and the management of project changes. Between the high and low performance projects, there are significant differences in above-mentioned seven critical success factors. Project team can control these positive correlation critical success factors to ensure the project performance. And also, there are significant differences in project objectives plan, the arrangement of plan implementation, the management of project changes, and the comprehensive abilities of project manager between the projects with different incentive systems. Meanwhile, the results of Factor Analysis Method and Entropy Method are the same in the empirical research.