Selection of good practices for small software development teams

Abstract

The world is increasingly dependent on technology and computing systems. Software organizations are facing a highly competitive market, and thus seeking good practices and processes that help keep them competitive. The quality of their products becomes a differentiating factor and is directly associated with these processes. The software products they deliver play a major role in this competitive scenario, to which small organizations do not have easy access. Our study is directed to those small and micro-organizations that lack the necessary financial assets to hire people, adopt and implement expensive processes, or even implement good development practices. In this paper we present our approach to help those organizations find good practices to enhance their software development processes. The method consisted of obtaining a possible company profile based on technical attributes, given as input to a knowledge-based system that derived a list of possible practices to be adopted according to that profile. Then project managers can select those more suitable to the company's present demands, and implement them in smaller steps according to the organization maturity levels. The approach was currently tested in two organizations that are by now implementing the suggested practices. The proposed system is freely available through the internet.