Identifying key characteristics of business rules that affect software project success

Abstract

Today, businesses need to continuously adjust to a dynamic environment. Enterprises have to deal with global competition and technological advances, meet government regulations, and keep their expenses under control. Under these pressures, enterprises need to implement and improve software that supports and helps to evolve their business. However, as practice shows, software implementation projects are complex, and a considerable percentage of them do not meet business requirements. Therefore, a business needs to manage software implementation properly. Existing research shows that using business rules (BR) in software implementation projects helps to ensure its success. The purpose of our study is to advance the understanding of how BR affect software implementation success, namely, which key characteristics of BR are the most important. To achieve this goal, the top thousand enterprises in Slovenia, by added value, facing typical software implementation projects were surveyed. The obtained results show that BR that are specifically prepared for a particular project and easy to understand have a statistically significant positive effect on software implementation project success.