A Systematic Analysis of the Effect of Task Clarity on Software Development Design

Two different types of development tasks are distinguished: Clear and unclear development tasks. Based on hypotheses from organizational theory two different designs of software development are derived. The transformational design is appropriate if the development task is clear. In case of an unclear development task software development should employ the adaptive design. The transformational design conforms to the explicit recommendations and implicit assumptions of process oriented software quality management, a software management style considered by many authors to be the universally valid paradigm of software development. Because of the fundamental differences between the two designs we conclude, that process oriented software quality management is not universally valid and should not be applied to unclear software development tasks.