José Adson Oliveira Guedes da Cunha

Towards a substantive theory of project decisions in software development project-based organizations: A cross-case analysis of IT organizations from Brazil and Portugal

Although the ability to make right decisions is considered a main indicator of organizational project management professionalism, many project, program, and portfolio managers are unwilling to try to improve the quality of their decisions. This ongoing research aims to develop a substantive theory about the decision-making processes considering four elements: cognitive biases, tools and techniques, emotions and organizational factors in the context of software development project-based organizations considering the three levels of project governance: project, program, and portfolio. This paper presents the first results of the research and proposes to shed light on the susceptibility of IT project managers to cognitive biases and how they deal with them, including techniques and tools they use to minimize their negative effects. This study evaluates eight cognitive biases: anchoring bias, exposure effect, hindsight bias, halo effect, planning fallacy, sunk-cost fallacy, availability-related bias, and Parkinsons law effect. The qualitative approach was based on semi-structured interviews with project managers from IT organizations from Brazil and Portugal. Agile practices and knowledge management activities were cited as good practices.

Approaches to strategic alignment of software process improvement: A systematic literature review

Abstract Context: Software process improvement (SPI) aims to increase the effectiveness of a software organization. Many studies indicate that the strategic alignment is a critical factor for the SPI success. However, little is known about practical approaches to achieving and maintaining such alignment. Objective: The goal of this study is to evaluate the validation evidence of the existing approaches to the strategic alignment of SPI. Method: We develop a search protocol that combines database search and snowballing to perform the systematic literature review and evaluate empirical studies by applying rigor and relevance criteria. To evaluate the efficiency of our protocol, we use a “quasi-gold standard” to compute the sensitivity and precision of the search. Result: We identified 30 studies (18 empirical) and 19 approaches to strategic alignment of SPI from 495 retrieved studies. Only three out of the 18 empirical studies were rated as high in the categories rigor and relevance, suggesting the need for a stronger validation of the approaches. Conclusion: We conclude that the lack of empirical validation indicates that the results of the existing approaches have not been adequately transferred to practitioners yet, calling for more rigorous studies on the subject.