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The purpose of this paper is to find good values of onsite-offshore team strength; number of hours of communication between business users and onsite team and between onsite and offshore team so as to reduce project cost and improve schedule in a global software development (GSD) environment for software development project.

This study employs system dynamics simulation approach to study software project characteristics in both co-located and distributed development environments. The authors consulted 14 experts from Indian software outsourcing industry during our model construction and validation.

The study results show that there is a drop in overall team productivity in outsourcing environment by considering the offshore options. But the project cost can be reduced by employing the offshore team for coding and testing work only with minimal training for imparting business knowledge. The research results show that there is a potential to save project cost by being flexible in project schedule.

The implication of the study is that the project management team should be careful not to keep high percentage of manpower at offshore location in distributed software environment. A large offshore team can increase project cost and schedule due to higher training overhead, lower productivity and higher error proneness. In GSD, the management effort should be to keep requirement analysis and design work at onsite location and involves the offshore team in coding and testing work.

The software project manager can use the model results to divide the software team between onsite and offshore location during various phases of software development in distributed environment.

The study is novel as there is little attempt at finding the team distribution between onsite and offshore location in GSD environment.

The purpose of this paper is to review the content, contributions and subsequent developments of the seminal paper by Barry Boehm, “A spiral model of software development and enhancement” written in 1988. The relationships of this paper to software development, agile projects, real options and present practice are put into perspective.

Basically an essayist approach is taken. First, the contents of Boehm's paper are reviewed and then associated with subsequent developments.

Review of the paper as published represents a documentation of cutting‐edge software development as it existed at the time. Fundamentally it suggests the viability of a non‐linear, customer‐influenced, development approach.

This basic approach illustrated in the spiral model of course has found its way into complex project approaches and management.

This paper follows the lines of increasing attention to classics, which is the purpose of this special issue of the journal. In particular, attention is called to the transition of thought on projects and project management from supplier‐oriented, linear processes to customer/client‐influenced, non‐linear ones.

This study aims to understand how practitioners use their insights in software development models to share experiences within and between organizations.

This is a qualitative study of practitioners in software development projects, in large-, medium- or small-size businesses. It analyzes interview material in three-step iterations to understand reflexive practice when using software development models.

The study shows how work processes are based on team members’ experiences and common views. This study highlights the challenges of organizational learning in system development projects. Current practice is unreflective, habitual and lacks systematic ways to address recurring problems and share information within and between organizations. Learning is episodic and sporadic. Knowledge from previous experience is individual not organizational.

Software development teams and organizations tend to learn about, and adopt, software development models episodically. This research expands understanding of how organizational learning takes place within and between organizations with practitioners who participate in teams. Learnings show the potential for further research to determine how new curriculums might be formed for teaching software development model improvements.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and quantify the key components of the overall cost of software development when warranty coverage is given by a developer. Also, the authors have studied the impact of imperfect debugging on the optimal release time, warranty policy and development cost which signifies that it is important for the developers to control the parameters that cause a sharp increase in cost.

An optimization problem is formulated to minimize software development cost by considering imperfect fault removal process, faults generation at a constant rate and an environmental factor to differentiate the operational phase from the testing phase. Another optimization problem under perfect debugging conditions, i.e. without error generation is constructed for comparison. These optimization models are solved in MATLAB, and their solutions provide insights to the degree of impact of imperfect debugging on the optimal policies with respect to software release time and warranty time.

A real-life fault data set of Radar System is used to study the impact of various cost factors via sensitivity analysis on release and warranty policy. If firms tend to provide warranty for a longer period of time, then they may have to bear losses due to increased debugging cost with more number of failures occurring during the warrantied time but if the warranty is not provided for sufficient time it may not act as sufficient hedge during field failures.

Every firm is fighting to remain in the competition and expand market share by offering the latest technology-based products, using innovative marketing strategies. Warranty is one such strategic tool to promote the product among masses and develop a sense of quality in the user’s mind. In this paper, the failures encountered during development and after software release are considered to model the failure process.

The purpose of this paper is to present a model of the 24‐h software development process to help software project managers assess the profitability of a 24‐h development configuration and to select the optimal partnering sites. The model also helps the customer‐support divisions of software firms to decide which customer requests need to be performed using the 24‐h development mode.

This paper presents a graphical representation of the 24‐h software development process. Highlighting the importance of interaction times between two sites and the role of product‐, process‐, and site‐related factors that influence its value, the paper adopts the method of pair‐wise comparison of factors as done in the case of analytical hierarchy process and proposes a multiplicative model for its estimation. The software development time and cost are thereafter estimated by using site‐specific values of work hours, compensation package, and productivity. The approach is used to determine the economic viability of 24‐h development and make optimum site selection for a number of decision‐making situations.

The results obtained from applying the models to hypothetical, but realistic problems, with different values for site‐ and personnel‐specific factors to prove the ability of the model to be used in real‐life situations.

The proposed model does not consider effects of factors like multiple interactions, reworks, and errors in communication.

A circular representation of the 24‐h software development process, the multiplicative model for estimating the length of interaction time, and the time and cost of development in such a process are the main contributions of the paper.

The aim of this paper is to make an attempt to find good values of onsite–offshore team strength; number of hours of communication between business users and onsite team and between onsite and offshore team to reduce cost and improve schedule for re-engineering projects in global software development environment.

The system dynamics technique is used for simulation model construction and policy run experimentation. The experts from Indian software outsourcing industry were consulted for model construction, validation and analysis of policy run results in both co-located and distributed software development environment.

The study results show that there is a drop in the overall team productivity in outsourcing environment by considering the offshore options. But the project cost can be reduced by employing the offshore team for coding and testing work only with minimal training for imparting business knowledge. The research results show that there is a potential to save project cost by being flexible in project schedule.

The study found that there could be substantial cost saving for re-engineering projects with a loss of project schedule when an appropriate onsite–offshore combination is used. The quality and productivity drop, however, were rather small for such combinations. The cost savings are high when re-engineering work is sent to offshore location entirely after completion of requirement analysis work at onsite location and providing training to offshore team in business knowledge The research findings show that there is potential to make large cost savings by being flexible in project schedule for re-engineering projects.

The software project manager can use the model results to divide the software team between onsite and offshore location during various phases of software development in distributed environment.

The study is novel as there is little attempt at finding the team distribution between onsite and offshore location in global software development environment.

Software development life cycle (SDLC) has always been the core methodology for any software engineer that depicts the entire development process which an organization is bound to utilize to achieve successful software. The purpose of this paper is to bring forth a conceptual model after analysing the best practices in SDLC, and extracting the best out of agile methodologies and the open source software, thereby bringing forward an optimised structure.

The OASDLC is hypothesized specifically for “Brihaspati” project and is formulated keeping in mind the gaps and limitations posed by existing SDLC models. OASDLC is further put to test for achieving lower costs and efforts involved. The tests are further substantiated by means of hypothesis validation through execution of a survey based research.

It has been observed that the present conceptual model further optimizes the efforts involved while adopting such a practice.

This paper proposes a novel SDLC model so as to achieve a best practice for a software project. On analysing the issues involved such as tight budget and timelines, it led the authors to formulate a newer concept “Open Agile Software Development Life Cycle model” (OASDLC).

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of a pragmatic approach to components off‐the‐shelf (COTS)‐based development. Software product line (SPL) is at the forefront among the techniques for reducing costs, decreasing schedule time, and ensuring commonality of features across a family of products – as COTS are reused in multiple products.

A disciplined process for SPL development is still needed. This paper proposes the Y‐model for COTS‐based SPL development. The model put forward identifies and elaborates the essential phases and activities of SPL development from COTS‐based repository.

The Y‐model provides an efficient way of integrating the approaches of SPL and COTS‐based development as a cohesive software development model.

The model has the potential to tremendously increase software engineers' productivity. Thus, software architects, domain engineers and component designers should become aware of how to use these ideas to structure their models and designs.

This paper describes a systematic approach for COTS‐based development that takes into account the cataloguing and retrieval of software assets permeating a process that encompasses all stages of software development, from system product requirements engineering to system deployment.

While the choices available for project management methodologies have increased significantly, questions remain on whether project managers fully consider their alternatives. When project categorization systems and criteria are not logically matched with project objectives, characteristics and environment, this may provide the key reason for why many software projects are reported to fail to deliver on time, budget or do not give value to the client. The purpose of this paper is to identify and categorize critical success factors (CSFs) and develop a contingency fit model contrasting perspectives of traditional plan-based and agile methodologies.

By systematically reviewing the previous literature, a total of 37 CSFs for software development projects are identified from 148 articles, and then categorized into three major CSFs: organizational, team and customer factors. A contingency fit model augments this by highlighting the necessity to match project characteristics and project management methodology to these CSFs.

Within the three major categories of CSFs, individual factors are ranked based on how frequently they have been cited in previous studies, overall as well as across the two main project management methodologies (traditional, agile). Differences in these rankings as well as mixed empirical support suggest that previous research may not have adequately theorized when particular CSFs will affect project success and lend support for the hypothesized contingency model between CSFs, project characteristics and project success criteria.

This research is conceptual and meta-analytic in its focus. A crucial task for future research should be to test the contingency fit model developed using empirical data. There is no broad consensus among researchers and practitioners in categorizing CSFs for software development projects. However, through an extensive search and analysis of the literature on CSFs for software development projects, the research provides greater clarity on the categories of CSFs and how their direct, indirect and moderated effects on project success can be modelled.

This study proposes a contingency fit model and contributes towards developing a theory for assessing the role of CSFs for project success. While future empirical testing of this conceptual model is essential, it provides an initial step for guiding quantitative data collection, specifies detailed empirical analysis for comparative studies, and is likely to improve clarity in debate. Since previous studies have not rigorously assessed the impact of fit between project characteristics, project environment and project management methodology on project success, additional empirically robust studies will help to clarify contradictory findings that have limited theory development for CSFs of software development projects to date.

Previous research for software development projects has frequently not fully incorporated contingency as moderation or contingency as fit (traditional vs agile). This research sets out to develop fully a contingency fit perspective on software development project success, through contrasting traditional plan-driven and agile methodologies. To do this, the paper systematically identifies and ranks 37 CSFs for software projects from 148 journal publications and holistically categorizes them as organizational, team, customer and project factors.

This study aims to investigate the effects of organizational culture factors on the selection of software process development models and develops a conceptual model for selecting and adopting process development models with an organizational culture approach, using 12 criteria and their sub-criteria defined in Fey and Denison’s model (12 criteria).

The research hypotheses were investigated using statistical analysis, and then the criteria and sub-criteria were selected based on Fey and Denison’s model and the experts’ viewpoints. Afterward, the organizational culture of the selected company was measured using the data from 2016 and 2017, based on Fey and Denison’s questionnaire. Due to the correlation between the criteria, using the decision-making trial and evaluation technique, the correlation between sub-criteria were determined, and by analytical network process method and using Super-Decision software, the process development model was preferred to the 12 common models in information systems development.

Results indicated a significant and positive effect of organizational culture factors (except the core values factor) on the selection of development models. Also, by changing the value of organizational culture, the selected process development model changed either. Sensitivity analysis performed on the sub-criteria implied that by changing and improving some sub-criteria, the organization will be ready and willing to use the agile or risk-based models such as spiral and win-win models. Concerning units where the mentioned indicators were at moderate and low limits, models such as waterfall, V-shaped and incremental worked more appropriately.

While many studies were performed in comparing development models and investigating their strengths and weaknesses, and the impact of organizational culture on the success of information technology projects, literature indicated that the impact of organizational sub-culture prevailing in the selection of development process models has not been investigated. In this study, new factors and indicators were addressed affecting the selection of development models with a focus on organizational culture. Correlation among the factors and indicators was also investigated and, finally, a conceptual model was proposed for proper adoption of the models and methodologies of system development.