Environmental Factors Influencing Individual Decision-Making Behavior in Software Projects: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

As one of the crucial human aspects, individual decision-making behavior may affect the quality of a software project, and it is adaptive to the environment in which an individual is practicing. 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 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.