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Many software projects are late, over budget, and fail even before delivery (Lauesen, 2020). The most common reason for schedule slippages, cost overruns, or outright cancellation of software projects is that they contain too many defects to operate successfully (Jones, 2006). Arcos-Medina and Mauricio (2020) note that the lack of quality directly contributes to the failure of software projects. Delivering poor quality software products can reduce the business value of the organizations for which the software has been built (Chappell, 2012).
Software project risk factors that cause project failures can be categorized into technical, environmental, managerial, and organizational (Gondal et al., 2018). Technical factors presented the greatest risks related to software development (Jones, 2006). Software technologies used in the project environment can have a significant impact on software project outcomes since development and deployment of software systems is a multidimensional process where people and technology are interconnected (Lehtinen et al., 2014). In a study conducted by Mohagheghi and Jørgensen (2020), project challenges were mainly associated with technical and human factors. Challenges with technologies are caused due to lack of technical competence with new technologies. Technical factors play a critical role in the decision-making of the software development process, such as release plans, selection of test strategies, etc. (Staron, 2012).
This study helps answer questions related to the type of technologies that can be used to develop and enhance quality software projects. In addition to analyzing the technological determinants, situational drivers such as project size, project type, project newness (based on year of development), type of software sourcing, and team size were also included (Clarke and O’Connor, 2012) in the research model to test their impact on software project quality. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of technological and situational factors on software quality. For the purposes of this study, software quality is measured by the defect density of developed and enhanced software projects using the ISBSG (International Software Benchmarking Standard Group) dataset. According to ISBSG, defect density is the quality of software measured as the number of defects of the delivered software per 1000 functional size units of software during the first month of software use. In this study, lower defect density refers to a fewer number of defects in the delivered software per unit size during the first month of software use, thus indicating better quality software projects. In contrast, higher defect density refers to a large number of defects in the delivered software per unit size during the first month of software use, thus indicating low quality software projects.
Software project managers can use the findings from this research to reduce the defect density of the software development and enhancement projects they oversee. Findings from the empirical analysis provide actionable insights to the managers in making important decisions related to the type of technical and situational factors that will impact defect density during the software development and enhancement process. In addition, this study examines software projects developed over a 20-year time span. Previous studies have not examined such a time span. This 20-year time span provides insights not identifiable with studies reviewing projects over shorter time frames.