The sociocultural dimension of the Software Process Improvement Manifesto: Pilot validation by experts

Elli Georgiadou,Margaret Ross,Kerstin Siakas,Harjinder Rahanu,Eleni Berki,John Estdale

doi:10.1002/smr.2304

Abstract

AbstractThe Software Process Improvement (SPI) Manifesto is based on three basic values: people, business focus and organisational change underpinning the philosophy of SPI. In turn, these values bring up to date certain SPI principles serving as a foundation for action in software development. The authors of this paper carried out a pilot expert validation of the sociocultural dimension of the sociocultural, technical, economic, environmental, political, legal, ethical and demographic analysis of the SPI Manifesto. Further, the authors report on the rationale and results of the pilot validation of both the survey instrument and the qualitative responses generated by the field experts, targeting to enlighten and reinforce the importance of the sociocultural dimension of the SPI Manifesto in research and development. The related literature review findings and the pilot research study strengthen this target. The pilot study with experts in particular provided stronger indications that the sociocultural dimension is considered of high importance by between 62% and 88% of the respondents, who were IT and computing professionals and software practitioners from academia and industry.

Highlights

As detailed in Georgiadou et al.,[1] two manifestos were issued by expert groups of software engineers, namely, the Agile Manifesto (AM)[2] in 2001 and the Software Process Improvement (SPI) Manifesto[3] in 2009, both of which aim to increase the quality of the software process and enhance the attitudes of software engineers and organisational culture and development practices, as these are the prerequisites for improving the quality of the resulting software products
Earlier, starting in 2005, the principles and values of these two paradigms had been combined in various research and development projects[4,5] that focused on different aspects of the software process such as software quality,[5,6,7,8] process formality and process agility[4,9] as well as software quality deployment with scaled agility-in the-large, more recently.[10]
This research study focused on a pilot validation with field experts in order to initialise an endeavour to review, reformulate and upgrade, where possible and necessary, the SPI Manifesto

Summary

Introduction

As detailed in Georgiadou et al.,[1] two manifestos were issued by expert groups of software engineers (academics and software practitioners in both cases), namely, the Agile Manifesto (AM)[2] in 2001 and the Software Process Improvement (SPI) Manifesto[3] in 2009, both of which aim to increase the quality of the software process and enhance the attitudes of software engineers and organisational culture and development practices, as these are the prerequisites for improving the quality of the resulting software products.In that context, the section highlights the strengths and summarises the evolving and restructuring nature of SPI Manifesto.1.1 | Manifestos in software quality engineering: Evolutionary or revolutionary?Twenty years after the launch of the AM and 10 years after the launch of the SPI Manifesto, a wealth of practice and criticisms abound. Earlier, starting in 2005, the principles and values of these two paradigms had been combined in various research and development projects[4,5] that focused on different aspects of the software process such as software quality,[5,6,7,8] process formality and process agility[4,9] as well as software quality deployment with scaled agility-in the-large, more recently.[10] Putting in the picture and bringing up to date the ameliorating nature of the values and principles that formed the basis of the two manifestos fortified the need to find more on the sociocultural dimension and, form the rationale to underpin this study

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Conclusion