Evaluating software project control centers in industrial environments

Many software development organizations still lack support for detecting and reacting to critical project states in order to achieve planned goals. One means to institutionalize project control, systematic quality assurance, and management support on the basis of measurement and explicit models is the establishment of so-called Software Project Control Centers. However, there is only little experience reported in the literature with respect to setting up and applying such control centers in industrial environments. One possible reason is the lack of appropriate evaluation instruments (such as validated questionnaires and appropriate analysis procedures). Therefore, we developed an initial measurement instrument to systematically collect experience with respect to the deployment and use of control centers. Our main research goal was to develop and evaluate the measurement instrument. The instrument is based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and customized to project controlling. This article illustrates the application and evaluation of this measurement instrument in the context of industrial case studies and provides lessons learned for further improvement. In addition, related work and conclusions for future work are given.