Fit of development methodologies in software projects

Software project outcomes characterized by meeting goal achievement and performance triad of budget, schedule and quality have been shown to be contingent upon project environment factors. However, choice of methodology and its implications on project outcomes still remain under-investigated. Following contingency theory, we empirically examine the effect of the fit between the choice of development methodology and project environment on the project outcome. We analysed a sample of 163 software development projects using PLS-SEM and our results show that the use of traditional methodology strongly countered the negative effect of requirement volatility on project outcome compared to agile methodologies and use of hybrid methodologies showed a stronger positive effect of project complexity on goal achievement. Further, for critical projects, use of agile methodologies favoured goal achievement.