Software enterprises should develop high-quality products to thrive in the competitive markets amid continuous changes in requirements and situations while adapting to changes in the operational environment while improving the software development process. Most organizations embrace diverse strategies, including gamification, human factors, relevant skills, experts, and organizational structure, to enhance the quality of products and sustainability of corporate operations. In this regard, human factors’ lack of sufficient understanding of the software improvement processes makes it challenging to achieve the desired software process improvement (SPI) results. The researcher in this project identified SPI as one of the critical initiatives for enhancing product quality and ensuring organizations accomplish software goals. However, the attainment of effective SPI requires a set of activities and factors initiated in the software development environment. The factors constitute critical success factors (CSFs), which are actions and activities completed by the project team to achieve established goals through effective implementation of SPI. In a literature analysis, the researcher identified SPI’s main setbacks in software development because organizations and projects lack root causes analysis on why projects fail, review of continuous improvement models, and inputs of experienced project managers. The embedded survey affirmed that CSFs constitute the SPI solution in modern software development processes and projects.

SPI critical success factors survey cumulative analysis quantitative research