Software Process Improvement Practices Research Articles

Success Factors for Conducting Software-Process Improvement in Web-Based Software Projects

Abstract Continuous Software Process Improvement (SPI) is essential for achieving and maintaining high-quality software products. Web-based software enterprises, comprising a substantial proportion of global businesses and forming a cornerstone of the world’s industrial economy, are actively pursuing SPI initiatives. While these companies recognize the critical role of process enhancement in achieving success, they face challenges in implementing SPI due to the distinctive characteristics of Web-based software projects. This study aims to identify, validate, and prioritize the sustainability success factors that positively influence SPI implementation efforts in Web-based software projects. Data have been meticulously gathered through a systematic literature review and quantitatively through a survey questionnaire. The findings of this research empower Web-based software enterprises to refine their management strategies for evaluating and bolstering SPI practices within the Web-based software projects domain.

A process capability based assessment model for software workforce in emergent software organizations

Software process improvement frameworks for software organizations enable to identify opportunities for improving the processes as well as establishing road maps for improvement. However, software process improvement practice showed that to achieve a sustained, leveraged state, software organizations need to focus on the workforce as much as the process. Software process improvement frameworks address the people dimension indirectly through processes. To complement process assessment models/methods, there is a need of mechanisms that address the problem of “how to assess, identify and prioritize detailed skill and knowledge improvement needs in relation to roles and processes of software organizations”. In this study, we developed a Software Workforce Assessment Model (SWAM) for emergent software organizations to perform role based workforce skill assessment aligned with software processes by coupling SW-CMM and SWEBOK models. SWAM is developed in accordance with the widely accepted assessment and evaluation theory principles. It is composed of an assessment baseline for software roles, criteria and scales for assessment. A SWAM based assessment process uses specific techniques such as Euclidian distance and dendogram diagrams to obtain useful results from data obtained from assessments. Through a case study, SWAM is shown to be applicable and the results are valuable for an emergent software organization. Specifically, the assessment enables the organization to identify priority knowledge units, to decide the extent of trainings for groups of individuals, to effectively assign project roles, to identify improvement priorities for the practitioners related to their roles and finally facilitates enactment and improvement of the software processes.

SPI agility: How to navigate improvement projects

AbstractIn this study, we argue that today's changing business environment calls for agile Software Process Improvement (SPI) practices. The study combines experiences from 18 SPI projects executed from 1998 to 2002 at Ericsson in Gothenburg with insights from SPI and agility theory. We suggest that agile SPI practices are both effective and flexible; they employ adaptive governance mechanisms at the corporate level; and they combine different tactics on the project level. We identify and compare two different tactics for SPI projects. Inspired by procedural thinking, the first tactic, the supertanker, employs process‐push and aims for efficient process development and diffusion. On the basis of adaptive thinking, the second tactic, the motorboat, facilitates practice‐pull and aims for adaptive process development and diffusion. We also discuss how agile SPI practices require understanding of the different types of waters in which the two tactics navigate effectively. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Improving software organizations: agility challenges and implications

PurposeThe paper seeks to explore the impact of events in Software Process Improvement (SPI) environments based on a longitudinal study of a requirements management initiative at Ericsson.Design/methodology/approachThe paper presents the initiative from three perspectives – the improvement initiative, the targeted software practices, and the environment.FindingsSPI initiatives easily get interrupted, are side‐tracked, and progress slowly due to changing environments. While most practitioners are painfully aware of this, the SPI literature has so far only touched on the issue. Agility principles would have helped Ericsson respond more effectively to events that impacted the initiative. Development of agile SPI practices requires coordination and alignment with other initiatives to develop agile software organizations.Originality/valueSPI has been adopted by many organizations to help them to deliver quality software. However, its success is a matter of debate and this paper deals with the issues involved.

Managing knowledge in a software organization

This paper explores the practical usage of insights on knowledge management (KM) to support innovation in a software organization. The organization has for some time engaged in software process improvement (SPI) initiatives to improve its operation. The paper applies two complementary approaches to KM, the codified and the personalized, to evaluate current KM practices and to improve its SPI practices. Based on the insights from the case we review key principles within SPI and evaluate the applied KM approaches. We conclude that it is advisable for SPI efforts to explicitly address KM issues. Each software organization has to find its own balance between personalized and codified approaches, this balance needs to be dynamically adjusted as the organization matures, and the adopted KM approach should differentiate between different types of SPI services.

Software process and product improvement: an empirical assessment

Despite all the attention that software process improvement (SPI) practices have received, there is no solid evidence of how extensively they are used across organizations, and their impact on quality, cost, and on-time delivery. The findings of previous studies are based on case studies, often assessing the effectiveness of a particular methodology in a large company. In our attempt to obtain a broader insight into the software process improvement practices, we conducted a survey targeted at software developers in New England. We collected 67 responses and used descriptive statistics to analyze the survey results. In addition, we examined the impact of SPI methodologies on quality factors and compared the impact to the importance of quality factors for software developers. The Spearman correlation coefficient was used to determine the degree of correlation between the two.