Looking for the Holy Grail of Software Development

The history of software engineering has been marked by many famous project failures documented in papers, articles, and books. This pattern of lack of success has prompted the creation of dozens of software analysis, requirements definition, design methods, programming languages, software development environments, and software development processes all promoted as solving "the software problem." What we hear less about are software projects that were successful. This article reports on the findings of an extensive analysis of successful software projects that have been reported in the literature. It discusses the different interpretations of success and extracts the characteristics that successful projects have in common. These characteristics provide software project managers with an agenda of topics to be addressed that will help ensure, not guarantee, that their software project will be successful.