Assessing the risk factors associated with potential failure modes in the software development process

Abstract

Poor management attitude has been identified as the major challenge to software project management. Lack of knowledge and understanding of other pertinent risk factor dimensions in software projects (such as potential failure modes in the software development process) by managers and the current scarcity of research on the applicability of safety and reliability engineering tools (e.g., Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA)) for software project risk management to support managers‘ intuition accounted for the poor managerial attitude to persist. This study was conducted to address the identified problems and provide answers to the main research question: ‗How can the risk factors associated with potential failure modes in the software development process be assessed using the FMEA method?‘ The Diffusion of Innovation Theory (DIT) and the Technology Acceptance Theory/Model (TAT/TAM) were combined to provide the theoretical foundation for the study. The study adopted a combination of case study and survey design methods employing a mixed-method approach: qualitative and quantitative methods for data collection. The Miles and Huberman (1994) method was used to analyse the qualitative data that emerged from the study while descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyse the quantitative data. The findings revealed an authoritative list of potential failure modes in the software development process. The findings also revealed some likely causative factors of the identified failure and their associative risk effects on the software project outcome. The study also found that students that used the FMEA for their project risk management in a practical software engineering (SE) course acknowledged the method‘s ease of use and its applicability for the software project risk management practice. Some contributions of the study include the provision of insight into another dimension of risk factors in software development projects and a modified risk theory adopted from FMEA method for risk assessment, thus, presenting a novel methodological contribution in the field of SE research.