Software quality improvement in France telecom research center

Abstract

AbstractThe needs and business goals of France Telecom R&D are centered around achieving enhanced customer satisfaction and greater competitiveness. These key management concerns become drivers that initiate software process improvement with goals of higher software quality, lower development and maintenance costs, shorter time to market, and increased predictability and control of software products and processes.Software process improvement is considered as a continuous process; France Telecom R&D moves continually around a stabilization cycle, Standardize Do Check Act (SDCA) and an improvement cycle, Plan Do Check Act(PDCA). Within these cycles, in a series of steps of specific improvement, actions such as introducing new or improved practices into software processes are accomplished.The software process model is based on the ISO/IEC 12207 standard ‘Software Life‐Cycle Processes’, and the assessment method uses the ISO/IEC 15504 standard ‘Software process Assessment’. Some new processes are defined and used in the area of software engineering. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.