Demotivators of software process improvement: an empirical investigation

Abstract

AbstractWe have conducted an empirical study with 23 Vietnamese software practitioners to determine Software Process Improvement (SPI) demotivators. We have compared the demotivators identified by the Vietnamese practitioners with the demotivators identified by UK practitioners. The main objective of this study is to provide SPI managers with insight into the nature of factors that can hinder the success of a SPI program, so that SPI managers can better manage those demotivators to maximize practitioners' support for an SPI program.We used face‐to‐face questionnaire‐based survey sessions for gathering data. We also asked the participants to rank each identified SPI demotivator on a five‐point scale (high, medium, low, zero or do not know) to determine the perceived importance of each demotivator. From this, we proposed the notion of ‘perceived value’ associated with each identified demotivator.Our findings identify the ‘high’ and ‘medium’ perceived value demotivators that can undermine SPI initiatives. The findings also show that there are differences in SPI demotivators across practitioners' groups (i.e., developers and managers) and across organisational sizes (i.e. large and small‐to‐medium). Moreover, our results reveal the similarities and differences between SPI demotivators as perceived by practitioners in Vietnam and the United Kingdom. The findings are expected to provide SPI managers with insight to design and implement suitable strategies to deal with the identified SPI demotivators. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.