Software Development Success Criteria for Projects

Managing and successfully completing software projects can become challenging for project managers due to unforeseen changes in the information technology's business environment. Creating robust software development success criteria for the project and accordingly employing the corresponding development method can greatly help project managers in this regard. Since there is no best methodology that is taken as a software development norm or a best software development process, borrowing software development success criteria from each development process and combining these factors into a set of success criteria can be treated as new/better method to apply when possible. In this paper, we show, through case studies, that a combination of success criteria from extreme programming (XP) software project model and waterfall (WF) software development process can be treated as new and potentially better software development success criteria. We discuss how blending the success criteria of these two models can be used in developing a new success framework for projects, which in turn, can help in delivering a successful project within the information technology organizations.