The End of the Line: Project Management Challenges in Small Software Shops in Pakistan

Most software development companies are very small with only 1-10 employees. In developing countries such companies play an important role both locally and as providers of software and services to customers in other parts of the world. Understanding and improving their project management (PM) practices are, therefore, important not only in the local context, but also in the context of globalized software development. This paper explores actual PM practices in Pakistani Small Software development Shops (SSDS). We find PM challenges in addition to challenges reported by software engineering literature, and we have described the implications of those challenges on quality and productivity of Pakistani SSDSs. We also find that some Pakistani SSDS practices are similar to what is reported from SSDSs in other parts of the world, but other practices are related to the companies' position in the global software development chain.