Assessing the Impact of System Architecture on the Success of Project Management Methodologies in Software Engineering

Abstract

Aligning business and IT is crucial in the software industry, where successful software projects depend not only on technology but also on management methodology. Software implementation involves development, migration, and tailoring across architecture‐based systems. The previous studies care on measuring success or failure of project methodologies without interest in system architectures and their effect on project management phases. The wrong selection of management methodology means failure of IT firms, where there is a lack in studying the success factor of selecting suitable project management methodology. Furthermore, there is no study until now that cares on searching the relationship between system architectures and project management methodologies. This paper fills this gap by finding answers for the research question “is system architecture's type one of selection factor for methodology of software project management?” This study investigates different models that measured success of the most popular project management methodologies (waterfall, agile, scrum, Kanban, Scrumban, agile‐waterfall, and DevOps) since 2019 until Jan 2026 through all three cases of software development (customization, ETO developing, migration) for three system architectures (MSA, SOA, Monolith). This study uses descriptive statistics to study the relation between system architectures and software project management. Pearson Correlation and Paired t‐test are used to study the success of developing system architecture by management methodologies. Means and Cohen's d are also used to measure the degree of effect. The main result is that management methodology has variable significance in different cases of developing three architecture‐based systems. Selecting a system architecture is correlated and one of project management's success factors.