A case study on quality-affecting problems in software engineering projects

Software engineering projects normally have many different problems related to all phases of the project. In addition to technical problems, the projects normally suffer from problems caused by management practices and conflicts of interests. We concentrated on quality affecting problems in one software company. The experts of the studied organization agreed on 22 such problems. Almost all of those problems were related to management or human issues, only three had clearly technical causes. We describe those problems and their symptoms, causes and effects.