Software development under conditions of high task complexity and ambiguity

In a longitudinal study of 49 software development teams the authors investigate interactions between team and technology factors and the degree of complexity and ambiguity of the projects themselves. From the literature, they propose a theoretical model that identifies a characteristic of the technology (reuse) and a characteristic of the team process (conflict resolution) used during development as effective for minimizing the adverse effects of high task-based complexity and ambiguity. They hypothesize that reuse and conflict resolution techniques will account for a significant amount of the variance in user satisfaction for highly complex and ambiguous projects, but that this will not be true for simple and unambiguous projects. The findings confirm this hypothesis; effective conflict resolution and reuse are associated with significantly higher client satisfaction six months after implementation for all projects. These two factors explained 56% and 44% of the variance for highly complex and ambiguous projects respectively but none of the variance for simple and unambiguous projects