The management of organizational change is an essential element of successful software process improvement efforts. This paper describes ten factors that affect organizational change in software process improvement initiatives based on the Capability Maturity Model or the ISO 9000 quality standards. It also assesses the relative importance of these factors and compares the findings with the results of previous research into organizational change in software process improvement. The paper is based on an analysis of published experience reports and case studies of 56 software organizations that have implemented an ISO 9000 quality system or that have conducted a CMM‐based process improvement initiative. Copyright © 1998 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

The management of organizational change is an essential element of successful software process improvement efforts. This paper describes ten factors that affect organizational change in software process improvement initiatives based on the Capability Maturity Model or the ISO 9000 quality standards. It also assesses the relative importance of these factors and compares the findings with the results of previous research into organizational change in software process improvement. The paper is based on an analysis of published experience reports and case studies of 56 software organizations that have implemented an ISO 9000 quality system or that have conducted a CMM-based process improvement initiative.

The measurement of information system project success (ISPS) is yet an unsolved problem. This work analyzes the way companies in Germany measure the success of their IS projects. It contains 12 semi-structured in-depth expert interviews with project managers and other decision makers to analyze (1) their subjective views on and (2) their companies' actual measurement of ISPS. Although the participants consider further success dimensions, the companies almost exclusively rely on the traditional criteria of time, cost, and quality. This study provides a new perspective on ISPS and shows that it is mainly a matter of measurability to use further success dimensions.

In most cases, software projects exceed their estimated effort. It is often assumed that inaccurate estimates are the main reason for these overruns. Contrarily, our results show that this assumption is not reasonable in many cases. We conducted a survey to gather data on the current situation of software development effort estimation. Apart from objective criteria, we also asked the participants for their subjective perceptions of the estimates. The participants' perceptions indicate that they do not agree with the objective assessments as 82% perceive their estimate as 'good' despite large overruns and provide reasonable arguments for their perceptions. Furthermore, many projects do not re-estimate the effort due to change requests leading to meaningless comparisons of estimated and actual effort. As a consequence, research needs to find new measures to assess the actual estimation accuracy. Besides the actual estimation process, professionals need to intensify their effort to manage the estimation processes' surroundings.

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