This thesis has been written in Finnish, but the English abstract is available below. The full thesis is available in PDF format on JYX.
This thesis focuses on the success factors of software projects and limitations of their universality. The success factor research is viewed as valuable, as a lot of resources are wasted on unsuccessful projects. Therefore, even small improvements to the success percentage have significant value. The research goals were to collect universality limitations of success factors and provide starting points for further research. The research roughly follows the systematic mapping study method. The literature was mainly collected from journals associated with information systems science. Additionally, more general viewpoints were included by collecting articles from project management journals. As the results of this research, common success factor research starting points were identified. Furthermore, important non-scientific literature related to success factor research was also identified. A list of success factors is also presented, to include examples of what success factors are. Finally, thoughts expressed in the reviewed literature about the universality limitations of success factors are presented. It can be concluded that the research on software project success factors is still evolving. For example, success factor as a term isn’t strictly defined, leading to variation in usage. Regardless of the evolving field and the detected variation, the reviewed literature wasn’t contradictory. For example, the critique presented in older articles towards the definition of project success was explainable with the seemingly newer way of dividing project success to project management and project success.
Keywords: project management, software projects, success factors, universality limitations of success factors
The thesis (7 cr) was given the grade 4. The full assessment statement is available in Finnish.
| ASSESSMENT | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Literature: Selection of references and mastery of the topic | x | |||||
| Outline of the research (structure and consistency) | x | |||||
| Results, discussion and conclusions | x | |||||
| Independence of the student and originality of the work | x | |||||
| Clarity and linguistic form and style of the presentation | x |
The assessment above is based on these instructions (in Finnish).
5 = excellent
4 = very good
3 = good
2 = satisfactory
1 = sufficient
0 = fail
If you simply want to observe the final files in their original format, download bachelors-thesis.zip from releases. This way you don't need to do anything below.
Requirements: PowerShell and Windows Terminal.
To track my thesis with git, I wrote a small collection of scripts to unzip and zip .docx files with. If you're on a Windows machine, simply download the repo as zip (Code > Download ZIP), unzip it and run _open_terminal.bat. From there, run .\scripts\zi.ps1 to recreate the original files.
PowerShell is in theory cross platform software, but I haven't tried running the scripts on macOS or on any Linux distribution. So if you're on one of those, best of luck you're on your own.
If you want to use the contents of this repository for anything (research etc.) please contact me at the email in my GitHub profile, although
- the .docx zip/unzip utility is available in a separate MIT-licensed repository and
- the thesis has been published as open access on JYX.