A framework for software engineering inconsistencies analysis and reduction

Despite the economic and functional importance of software systems in modern organizations, software development and maintenance are still regarded as high-risk activities. Indeed, a great number of software projects fail to deliver software systems meeting stakeholders requirements within schedule and budget. The great number of software failures and the high maintenance costs are the economic ramifications of the software crisis. The social ramifications of this crisis are related to the user´s resistance to software systems use in organizations. The software crisis seems to be the most important cause of the so-called “productivity paradox”. The paper provides a framework which on the one hand, permits understanding software crisis causes and on the other hand, proposes a software development process to help software developers to eliminate these causes. Instead of the traditional view of software engineering as a set of specifications, design and implementation activities, this framework, based on the economic agency theory, models software engineering in terms of contracts between interacting organizational actors with conflicting interests and points of view