Environmental factors influencing individual decision-making behavior in software projects

Abstract

As one of the crucial human aspects, individual decision-making behavior that may affect the quality of a software project is adaptive to the environment in which the individual is. However, no comprehensive reference framework of the environmental factors influencing individual decision-making behavior in software projects is presently available. This paper undertakes a systematic literature review (SLR) to gain insight into existing studies on this topic. After a careful SLR process, 40 studies were targeted to solve this question. Based on these extracted studies, we first provided a taxonomy of environmental factors comprising eight categories. Then a total of 237 factors are identified and classified using these eight categories, and some major environmental factors of each category are listed in the paper. The environmental factors listing and the taxonomy can help researchers and practitioners to better understand and predict the behavior of individuals during decision making and to design more effective solutions to improve people management in software projects. CCS Concepts• Social and professional topics~Project and people management • Software and its engineering~Software development process management• Software and its engineering~Software configuration management and version control systems • Applied computing~Law, social and behavioral sciences Keywords Decision-making behavior; Environmental factor; Systematic literature review; Software project

Grouping environmental factors influencing individual decision‐making behavior in software projects: A cluster analysis

“…The environmental factors have been classified into 8 categories that are subjectively obtained by SLR in a study . Compared with their results, we find that 4 categories, which are italicized in Table , are almost the same.…”

“…Therefore, task, team, organization, and competence are 4 important categories that should be paid attention to. In addition, from the viewpoint of the number of elements in each category, the number of elements in the 4 categories in our research are all less than the results in the previous study . The 4 categories are the major categories in the study, but they are not in our results.…”

“…In addition, from the viewpoint of the number of elements in each category, the number of elements in the 4 categories in our research are all less than the results in the previous study . The 4 categories are the major categories in the study, but they are not in our results. We think that the reason for the difference is that our 11 categories are more subdivided.…”

“…This study is the based on a prior study, in which 8 categories and 237 environmental factors that affect individual decision‐making behavior were identified by systematic literature review (SLR). That work, however, has some room for improvement.…”

“…To answer these questions, we adopt a cluster analysis to form a taxonomy of 237 environmental factors provided in the study that are our dataset. We believe clustering can reveal the very complex relationship between objects and features and was widely used to solve the correlation problem, for example, in the study by Choi et al For our research problem, semantic clustering is suitable because the objective of this clustering technique is grouping elements based on the similarity in their content .…”