Decision-Making in Software Project Management: A Systematic Literature Review

The mainstream research into project management has been criticized in the recent years for its heavy reliance on the functionalist view of projects characterized by linearity of the life cycle. Considering that instrumental approaches for project management are not sufficient for a flexible and uncertain product as software, the project success depends on how software project managers deal with the problems and make decisions. Different from the normative decision theory, which focus on how decisions should be made in order to be rational, the descriptive decision theory focus on how decisions are actually made and includes the naturalistic decision making models. Based on a systematic literature review, this paper aims to synthetize empirical studies published on journals and conferences proceedings that analyze the decision-making phenomenon in the software project management context from a naturalistic perspective. The search were conducted in five search engines: ScienceDirect, Scopus, Wiley, IEEE Xplore, and ACM Digital Library. The 27 selected papers were categorized and then synthesized into a thematic map. The categories included: agile development practices, stakeholders involvement, escalation and de-escalation of commitment factors, participatory decision-making, communication, use of rational methods, emotion, and cognitive biases. The results indicate that more studies are needed to better understand the decision-making phenomenon from this perspective. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.