Oddur Benedkitsson

SFC Software Forensics Centre

Reading Room

Oddur has been researching software process methods and processes improvement for the passed three decades. He has participated in a number of national and international projects in the area (e.g. SPICE – ISO/IEC Standards on Software Process Assessment). He has worked as a consultant in software system failure situations. Oddur is a Professor in Computer Science at University of Iceland and is a visiting scientist at Middlesex University.

One of the main research methods of the Software Development Science is making deductions from empirical evidence. Significant software development experiments are in general too expensive to be carried out so the empirical evidence must come from real software development projects. Numerous reports, papers, books, and web information exist that investigate the failures and successes of software projects. A number of commonly used software development and project management frameworks exist now. The deployment of these frameworks in software projects has been widely researched and reported on.

Current research:

Achieving retained value after failure of software project: A number of different Work Products (some intangible) are the outcome of a software development project. The following question is posed: Can software development be organised in such a way that the accumulated Work Products retain some value even if the project fails? Here software development methods that yield incremental delivery are seen to play a fundamental role.
Classification for software project outcome (failures and successes) needs to be developed and employed in a wide classification of a range of software projects. The classification is intended to give statistical evidence of what practices in terms of given project context are likely to lead to failed project on one hand and to successful project on the other hand.