Guest editorial for special section on success and failure in software engineering

Many papers investigate success and failure of software projects from diverse perspectives, leading to a myriad of antecedents, causes, correlates, factors and predictors of success and failure. This body of research has not yet produced a solid, empirically grounded body of evidence enabling actionable practices for increasing success and avoiding failure in software projects. The need for more evidence motivates this special issue, which includes four articles that contribute to our understanding of how software project success and failure relate to topics such as: requirements engineering, user satisfaction, start-up pivots and retrospective discussions. We moreover present a brief systematic review to both situate the accepted articles in existing literature and to explore enduring methodological and conceptual challenges in this area, including developing sound instruments for measuring success, representative sampling without population lists and creating both empirically sound and practically actionable taxonomies of success antecedents.