Scope creep: implications on customer satisfaction index in software industry

Software industry is currently fast paced in order to meet dynamic customer demands and to keep pace with competition. Hence, it is inevitable for organisations to generate high quality software within the acceptable band of constraints and resources. Even though mature organisation has incorporated all the best practices with state of the art technology, the development process always has an element of scope creep. The aim of this paper is to analyse the impact of scope creep in project success which is reflected through customer satisfaction. An empirical investigation is carried out in one of the leading software industries having a maturity level of CMMI level 5. Investigation results indicate the significance of scope creep in the customer satisfaction index, which truly indicates project success. The results also show impact of other parameter such as time, cost, complexity, number of developers and defect count on customer satisfaction index. This knowledge certainly brings in a radical change in formulating business strategies to effectively manage scope creep in the software projects.