Influential factors on incident management: lessons learned from a large sample of products in operation

Abstract

Understanding causal relationships on incident management can help software development organizations in finding the adequate level of resourcing, as well as improving the quality of services they provide to their end-users and/or cus tomers. This paper presents an empirical study conducted upon a sample of in cident reports recorded during the operation of several hundred commercial software products, over a period of three years, on six countries in Europe and Latin America. The underlying research questions refer to the validation of which are the influencing factors affecting the incidents management lifecycle. Non parametric analysis of variance procedures are used for testing hypotheses.