It has been suggested that there is more than one reason for a software development project to fail. However, most of the literature that discusses project failure tends to be rather general, supplying us with lists of risk and failure factors, and focusing on the negative business effects of the failure. Very little research has attempted an in-depth investigation of a number of failed projects to identify exactly what are the factors behind the failure. In this research we analyze data from 70 failed projects. This data provides us with practitionerspsila perspectives on 57 development and management factors for projects they considered were failures. Our results show that all projects we investigated suffered from numerous failure factors. For a single project the number of such factors ranges from 5 to 47. While there does not appear to be any overarching set of failure factors we discovered that all of the projects suffered from poor project management. Most projects additionally suffered from organizational factors outside the project managerpsilas control. We conclude with suggestions for minimizing the four most common failure factors.

We survey software practitioners' perceptions of the prototyping and waterfall approaches and find that department size has a significant effect on their attitudes to the advantages and disadvantages of the approaches.Overall respondents from small departments prefer a prototyping approach, respondents from medium sized departments prefer a waterfall approach, while respondents from large departments are more aware of the benefits of both approaches.However, until a mature controlled software development process is in place all the benefits provided by these software development approaches are unlikely to be perceived.