Breaking old Habits: On Success Factors in Software Process Improvement

Over the years, a substantial body of knowledge of software process improvement (SPI) was accumulated that, among other things, includes numerous success factors that companies should consider when conducting improvement activities. The number of success factors is large and quite often, multiple success factors with similar names and descriptions are available to address a specific phenomenon. This raises the question whether all the success factors are unique and, if not, which ones are actually the same. In this paper, we aim to structure the body of knowledge on success factors in SPI. We conducted a systematic literature review on 103 publications that mention 1.320 success factors. A multi-staged manual and AI-supported analysis reduced the number of success factors to 124, which we categorize into 42 general success factor classes. For 20 of these general success factor classes, we observed a stable number of publications over a period of almost 30 years that, however, show only few success factors constantly studied and re-discovered. A high number of synonyms shows that this area of SPI needs consolidation for which we lay the foundation by providing a big picture and identifying the most relevant success factors as a starting point.