The impact of staff turnover on software projects

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The impact of staff turnover on software projects: the importance of understanding what makes software practitioners tick

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Special Interest Group on Computer Personnel Research Annual Conference archive
Proceedings of the 2008 ACM SIGMIS CPR conference on Computer personnel doctoral consortium and research table of contents

Charlottesville, VA, USA

SESSION: Software table of contents

Pages 30-39

Year of Publication: 2008

ISBN:978-1-60558-069-2

Authors

Tracy Hall	Brunel University, Middlesex, United Kingdom
Sarah Beecham	University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, United Kingdom
June Verner	National ICT Australia, Sydney, Australia
David Wilson	University of Technology, Sydney, Sydney, Australia

Sponsors

SIGMIS: ACM Special Interest Group on Management Information Systems
ACM: Association for Computing Machinery

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

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Downloads (6 Weeks): 22, Downloads (12 Months): 158, Citation Count: 2

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ABSTRACT

In this paper we investigate the impact of staff turnover on software projects. In particular we investigate whether high staff turnover damages project success. We analyse data from an empirical study of 89 software practitioners to show that projects with high staff turnover are less successful. Furthermore our empirical data suggests a relationship between high staff turnover on projects and low staff motivation levels. We discuss factors which have been previously found to improve motivation levels and conclude that improving motivation levels can reduce staff turnover, which in turn increases project success.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

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CITED BY 2

	Helen Sharp , Nathan Baddoo , Sarah Beecham , Tracy Hall , Hugh Robinson, Models of motivation in software engineering, Information and Software Technology, v.51 n.1, p.219-233, January, 2009
	Helen Sharp , Tracy Hall, An initial investigation of software practitioners' motivation, Proceedings of the 2009 ICSE Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects on Software Engineering, p.84-91, May 17-17, 2009