Title: Scope creep: implications on customer satisfaction index in software industry

Authors: K. Lakshmi Madhuri; Jawahar J. Rao; Suma Vasudeva Murthy

Addresses: Research and Development Centre, Bharathiar University, Coimbatore – 641046, India ' Research and Industry Incubation Centre, Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering, Bangalore – 560078, India ' Research and Industry Incubation Centre, Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering, Bangalore – 560078, India

Abstract: Software industry is currently fast paced in order to meet dynamic customer demands and to keep pace with competition. Hence, it is inevitable for organisations to generate high quality software within the acceptable band of constraints and resources. Even though mature organisation has incorporated all the best practices with state of the art technology, the development process always has an element of scope creep. The aim of this paper is to analyse the impact of scope creep in project success which is reflected through customer satisfaction. An empirical investigation is carried out in one of the leading software industries having a maturity level of CMMI level 5. Investigation results indicate the significance of scope creep in the customer satisfaction index, which truly indicates project success. The results also show impact of other parameter such as time, cost, complexity, number of developers and defect count on customer satisfaction index. This knowledge certainly brings in a radical change in formulating business strategies to effectively manage scope creep in the software projects.

Keywords: software engineering; software quality; scope creep management; total customer satisfaction; software process; customer satisfaction index; software industry; project success; software projects; project management.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPQM.2016.078007

International Journal of Productivity and Quality Management, 2016 Vol.19 No.1, pp.21 - 37

Received: 03 Nov 2014
Accepted: 17 Dec 2014
Published online: 31 Jul 2016 *

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