Soft factors and their impact on time to market

Abstract

Time to market is considered to be one of the most important quality attributes for an organization to retain its competitive edge. Soft factors are at least as important as technical issues in improving and controlling the time to market. Soft factors are used as a collective term for factors that are difficult to quantify exactly, i.e. non-technical aspects. Based on the identified importance of the soft factors, a method, incorporating the soft factors, has been developed to increase the predictability of time to market. The method consists of three main parts: model development, model usage and model maintenance. The proposed method is general, while the actual model is primarily useful for the organization for which data have been collected. The objective is two-fold: first to prevent a general method of incorporating soft factors into the prediction of the time to market, and secondly to identify a set of critical soft factors for the organization in which data have been collected. The model is based on data collection from 12 large software projects. Time to market, effort (manhours) and a grade for ten soft factors have been collected. The model is derived from a set of eight projects and it is evaluated using the remaining four projects. The method is shown to be superior to the prediction made without taking the soft factors into account. The need to maintain the model is stressed as the model will evolve with time through new experiences gained. The proposed method can be applied in practice to help software engineers and managers to plan and control time to market and soft factors in software projects.