Dräger (Netherlands)

Management problems in the development of software have been addressed over recent years by a focus on improvement of the development process. This paper states that software process improvement (SPI) should have an explicit product focus. The practical implementation of a method for product-focused software process improvement is presented and discussed and experiences from a particular development project are described. The main conclusions are that a product focus addresses the specific needs of a company very well and results in early availability and visibility of benefits. As a result, commitment of a product development team to an improvement programme is established. Furthermore, it appears that the benefits of the application of the P-SPI method outweigh the (relatively low) cost already in an early phase of the project. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In ESPRIT project PROFES, measurement according to the Goal/Question/Metric (GQM) approach is conducted in industrial software projects at Drager Medical Technology, Ericsson Finland, and Schlumberger Retail Petroleum Systems. A comparative case study investigates three different ways of applying GQM in product-focused process improvement: long-term GQM measurement programmes at the application sites to better understand and improve software products and processes; GQM-based construction and validation of product/process dependency models, which describe the process impact on software quality; and cost/benefit investigation of the PROFES improvement methodology using GQM for (meta-) analysis of improvement programmes. This paper outlines how GQM is applied for these three purposes.