Mind the gaps: increasing the impact of IS research on ISD performance improvement

Abstract

Poor performance has pervaded the last forty years of software development, evident across industry sectors, project size, budget, geographic location, system quality and functionality, and exacerbated by increased criticality of IT in organizational mission and strategy. A significant body of research has investigated the potential of emerging development methodologies to address these shortcomings but the effectiveness of these methods is largely supported by anecdotal evidence. At the same time, metrics and measurement are known to affect ISD performance but the existing literature on ISD metrics is misaligned with practitioners’ needs, leading to a lack of clarity about ISD metrics in practice. This paper presents an interdisciplinary literature review on ISD metrics to identify the underlying reasons for this misalignment and evaluate the extent to which existing literature can be used to better understand the impact of emerging software development methodologies on ISD performance.