An individual decision-making behavior is heavily influenced by and adaptedto external environmental factors. Given that software development is ahuman-centered activity, individual decision-making behavior may affect thesoftware project quality. Although environmental factors affectingdecision-making behavior in software projects have been identified in priorliterature, there is not yet an objective and a full taxonomy of these factors.Thus, it is not trivial to manage these complex and diverse factors. To addressthis deficiency, we first design a semantic similarity algorithm between wordsby utilizing the synonymy and hypernymy relationships in WordNet. Further, wepropose a method to measure semantic similarity between phrases and apply itinto k-means clustering algorithm to group these factors. Subsequently, weobtain a taxonomy of the environmental factors affecting individualdecision-making behavior in software projects, which includes eleven broadcategories, each containing two to five sub-categories. The taxonomy presentedherein is obtained by an objective method, and quite comprehensive, withappropriate references provided. The taxonomy holds significant value forresearchers and practitioners; it can help them to better understand the majoraspects of environmental factors, also to predict and guide the behavior ofindividuals during decision making towards a successful completion of softwareprojects.
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