Identification, assessment and ranking agile software development critical success factors - a factor analysis approach

Agile software development (ASD) methods have emerged as an innovative and diverse way of developing software as compared to the traditional methodologies that are having high project failure, higher cost and more time to complete the project, customer dissatisfaction, etc. The current study is conducted to identify and assess critical success factors along with discovering the perceived level of success factors for ASD. Initially, 39 variables have been identified and finally, 31 variables have been loaded into five factors that lead to success factors and further how these factors are related to perceived level of success factor that is again a cluster of further four identified variables (time, cost and efforts, quality and scope and requirements). The importance index is used to rank the factors along with the variables of the explored factors. Surprisingly, the important factors that came out were project factor followed by organisation, technical, people and process factors respectively.