A Study on Forecasting the Success of Software Projects

Abstract

Projects in software engineering have very low success rate compared to other engineering areas. This rate can be increased by building a better project plan with the help of project success forecasting tools. These tools employ prediction methods, which use time, budget and scope to perform estimations and they can only be used in late phases of the project. In this study, we proposed a new approach, which is capable of forecasting the project success in the initiation or the analysis phase of the project. In order to achieve this, we utilized sponsor score, which reflects the business outcomes of a project, as a metric. We also derived several features of these projects and evaluated their applicability with different classifiers in our forecasting approach. We tested our proposed method on a dataset of software projects, which were carried out in an international telecommunication company. Our results show that the proposed model is capable of predicting project success in the early stages of the project, in means of sponsor score.