Impact of development methodology on cost & risk for development projects

Abstract

In software projects, first of the challenges in projects is to manage successful delivery of the software project with minimal cost and high quality of software by constantly reducing & mitigating delivery risk. Cost control, Risk reduction & mitigation and success of a project becomes key focus for project manager. For reduction of cost & risk we need to first have the bird's eye of view which factors influence the risk & and impact success of the project, having this birds eye of view gives a ray of hope if development methodology being adopted for software development can help to reduce cost, risk and consequently increase success rate. Let's consider a hypotheses: Software development methodology used for developing software impacts success rate of project, risk and reduce cost. This study analyses this laid down hypothesis and test this relationship for various projects. Let's group methodologies into two groups, for developing the software namely Classical Software development life cycle methodology group (Classical SDLC Methodologies) & Agile methodologies, each of these methodologies groups have multiple models under each of these. This study researched both of these groups to analyze impact on fulfilling our laid down objectives of reduction in cost & risk and increased success rate of the project by picking one methodology from each group, Classical SDLC is older methodologies group comprising of Waterfall, spiral, Incremental etc. whereas Agile is a newer methodology group, particularly, it is researched that if Agile methodologies is better fit than Classical SDLC methodology — Waterfall model for meeting our core objectives. We obtained results for various completed projects and evidence is analyzed for deriving the final conclusion.