Project success in agile development software projects

Abstract

Project success has multiple definitions in the scholarly literature. Research has shown that some scholars and practitioners define project success as the completion of a project within schedule and within budget. Others consider a successful project as one in which the customer is satisfied with the product. This quantitative study was conducted to test the relationship between communications of agile teams and project success. The research also tested the relationship between software process improvement and project success. The researcher presented three different characterizations of project success (time, budget and customer satisfaction). Through correlation testing, the study examined the results of the relationship between communications, software process improvement, and project success. The customer satisfaction definition of project success was more closely correlated with projects in which communications was effective. Projects characterized as having a formal software process improvement process in place were more closely correlated with the cost and schedule definitions of project success. Implications of the study include conducting further research with ordinal data in the regression testing of the independent and dependent variables. Future work should concentrate upon risk and change management in an agile project management project environment. This work furthers the ideas contained in the Project Management Second Order (PM-2) framework.