Managing software development projects (2nd ed.): formula for success
Managing software development projects (2nd ed.): formula for success
Software project management: a unified framework
Software project management: a unified framework
How not to prepare for a consulting assignment, and other ugly consultancy truths
Communications of the ACM
A Defined Process For Project Postmortem Review
IEEE Software
Critical Success Factors In Software Projects
IEEE Software
Software Development Failures
Error Report Driven Post-Mortem Analysis
ICPC '07 Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension
IEEE Software
Communications of the ACM - Finding the Fun in Computer Science Education
PROFES'06 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement
Why software fails [software failure]
IEEE Spectrum
Post-mortems-methodology and experiences
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
Analysis and application of an outsourcing risk framework
Journal of Systems and Software
Exploratory case study research: Outsourced project failure
Information and Software Technology
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Context: Software project cancellations are often caused by mistakes made during the project, and such cancellations make a strong economic impact. We analyzed five cancelled software engineering projects. One case was an internal product development project of a company that sells products to its customers. The other four cases were different software engineering projects, and outcomes of these projects were planned to be delivered to external customers. Objective: This study reports a post-mortem analysis of five software engineering projects with the aim of providing more knowledge about the reasons for cancellation decisions and the causes behind those reasons. Methods: The research method is case study. A method for a document-based post-mortem analysis was developed and post-mortem analysis was performed. All project documentation was available for analysis. Results: The reasons for the cancellation decisions were well-known ones. In four cases of five, the outcome of the project was to be delivered to an external customer, but in these cases the causes of the cancellation reasons were not found from the normal project documentation. In these cases the cause of the cancellation originated in a phase before the start of the project and therefore the project was doomed before it was started. Conclusion: It is reasonable to suggest that a remarkable portion of project cancellations are due to mistakes made before the project is started in the case of contract-based software engineering projects.