Issues and Challenges of Cost Management in Agile Software Development Projects

In software development project, cost management has been identified as one of the challenges aspect should be faced by the project community. Poor cost management will affect the software projects such as project delay and cost overrun. Therefore, his paper tries to look into the issues and challenges faced by the Project Manager when they manage a cost in agile software development project. In this paper, qualitative approach was employed. 10 project managers that have been dealing with cost management process were interviewed. Results from the interviews had indicated that top five issues and challenges that have been highlighted by the project managers such as lack of expertise in agile, unavailability of computerised tools, reasons for adopting agile in cost management [is this a challenge?], success factors and lack of real commitment. However, the most critical issue is the unavailability of computerised tools which lead to the ineffectiveness of cost management activities. It is concluded that nonetheless, it is important to highlight the issues and challenges of agile cost management in order to prevent cost overrun and the ineffectiveness in managing the cost. One of the important issues is the unavailability of computerised tool to help project managers in managing a cost. The computerised tool is important not only for experienced project manager but also to the new project managers. They can simply use the tool without having much experience.