Design structure matrix for evaluation of critical success factors for software projects

Abstract

The topic of critical success factors draws high attention of both academia and practitioners working in the software industry. Literature review shows that existing models of critical success factors for software projects are more concentrated on specific categories of success factors, neglecting the interaction that exists within these models between different groups of factors. The purpose of this paper is to present a new concept of interaction-based model for identification and evaluation of critical success factors for software projects. The approach is based on conjoint use of graph theory and Design Structure Matrices to highlight important interactions of a project system. The key result of the paper is the tool for evaluation of the interaction between critical success factors through quantification and the analysis of the possible propagation of specific factor within project success factor network, which will make possible the identification of the critical factors with the highest influence on the entire project system.