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Chapter 6: Economic Factors and Abandoned Projects
Overview
chapter 4 to illustrate how the decisions to abandon those five projects were significantly influenced by the economic factors. Finally, we discuss the collective impact of the economic factors on the requirements, design, and implementation stages of the systems development process and point out the vulnerabilities of each of the three stages to project-abandonment decisions.The cost of software development is affected by the development schedule. As the time of completion is pushed backward due, for example, to changes in requirements and/or in the scope of the project, the estimated cost of the project may increase. On the other hand, attempts to keep to the original project schedule by increasing the size of the project team may sometimes have an adverse effect, due to the extra time needed to train the new team members and to bring them up to the functional level of the current team, thereby possibly increasing the overall cost of the project. Brooks ([1975] 1995, 25) succinctly makes the point with the aphorism that the effect of adding more people to an existing software project that is late is to make it later. Abdel-Hamid and Madnick (1990), on the other hand, caution against overgeneralizing that observation, because in their experience the results of adding staff to a project that is already late will depend on other attributes of the particular project. Still, "the added burden of communication" needed for each new team member "to be trained in the technology, the goals of the effort, the overall strategy and the plan of work" can contribute substantially to the cost estimates (Brooks 1995, 18). Thus, increasing the number of personnel involved in the project will likely increase the cost of the project and extend the time of completion. Alternatively, if the project is allowed to exceed its schedule estimates without an increase in the number of personnel involved, the cost of the project will also likely increase. Hence, the twin issues of project cost and time of completion constitute the main underlying economic problem in tackling project-abandonment decisions.
