Estimating and improving the probability of success of a software project by analysing the factors involved using data mining

Abstract

Software project management is the art and science of planning and leading software projects. It is a subdiscipline of project management in which software projects are planned, monitored and controlled. To ensure that a certain software project is successful is the main responsibility of the project manager. From the point of view of a project manager, a success is defined as: Did the system come in “up to specifications”, in time and on budget? Many factors come into play in deciding the success of the project such as project management, customer involvement etc. In this paper, online survey is used to collect project data about a number of factors upon which the outcome of the project depends. Data mining tools such as Association Rule Mining, Naive Bayes, Decision Tree and Neural networks are used to determine whether a project will be successful or not. In addition to that, it also finds out the most important factors guiding the project to success and determine the changes required to turn an unsuccessful project into a successful one.