Problems in measuring effectiveness in software process improvement: A longitudinal study of organizational change at Danske Data

We have conducted an empirical study with 23 Vietnamese software practitioners to determine Software Process Improvement (SPI) demotivators. We have compared the demotivators identified by the Vietnamese practitioners with the demotivators identified by UK practitioners. The main objective of this study is to provide SPI managers with insight into the nature of factors that can hinder the success of a SPI program, so that SPI managers can better manage those demotivators to maximize practitioners' support for an SPI program.We used face‐to‐face questionnaire‐based survey sessions for gathering data. We also asked the participants to rank each identified SPI demotivator on a five‐point scale (high, medium, low, zero or do not know) to determine the perceived importance of each demotivator. From this, we proposed the notion of ‘perceived value’ associated with each identified demotivator.Our findings identify the ‘high’ and ‘medium’ perceived value demotivators that can undermine SPI initiatives. The findings also show that there are differences in SPI demotivators across practitioners' groups (i.e., developers and managers) and across organisational sizes (i.e. large and small‐to‐medium). Moreover, our results reveal the similarities and differences between SPI demotivators as perceived by practitioners in Vietnam and the United Kingdom. The findings are expected to provide SPI managers with insight to design and implement suitable strategies to deal with the identified SPI demotivators. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This chapter discusses knowledge management (KM) aspects of how software process and software process improvement (SPI) is practiced within very small entities (VSEs) in the context of Irish software development industry. In particular, this study is concerned with the process of software development knowledge management in supporting the SPI. In order to understand the support process, the authors of this chapter have studied how KM processes are practiced within VSEs which includes communication, learning, sharing, and documentation process. This study also focuses in detail on the issues of the knowledge atrophy problem in VSEs. The findings explain how KM has been practiced and influenced the software development process and process improvement in VSEs. This result indicates that KM processes in VSEs are being undertaken in a very informal manner and also in indirect way. This is due to a small team size, autonomous working and macro-management style and caused VSEs to be more informal in their KM processes specifically and SPI generally. In addition, the results have indicated that the informal environment and culture helped VSEs to easily create and share knowledge between staff members and also assisted VSEs to mitigate the knowledge atrophy problem in their organization.

The emergence of agile methods and practices has not only changed the development processes but might also have affected how companies conduct software process improvement (SPI). Through a set of complementary studies, we aim to understand how SPI has changed in times of agile software development. Specifically, we aim (a) to identify and characterize the set of publications that connect elements of agility to SPI, (b) to explore to which extent agile methods/practices have been used in the context of SPI, and (c) to understand whether the topics addressed in the literature are relevant and useful for industry professionals. To study these questions, we conducted an in‐depth analysis of the literature identified in a previous mapping study, an interview study, and an analysis of the responses given by industry professionals to SPI‐related questions stemming from an independently conducted survey study. Regarding the first question, we identified 55 publications that focus on both SPI and agility of which 48 present and discuss how agile methods/practices are used to steer SPI initiatives. Regarding the second question, we found that the two most frequently mentioned agile methods in the context of SPI are Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP), while the most frequently mentioned agile practices are integrate often, test‐first, daily meeting, pair programming, retrospective, on‐site customer, and product backlog. Regarding the third question, we found that a majority of the interviewed and surveyed industry professionals see SPI as a continuous activity. They agree with the agile SPI literature that agile methods/practices play an important role in SPI activities but that the importance given to specific agile methods/practices does not always coincide with the frequency with which these methods/practices are mentioned in the literature.

Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is becoming a vital part of present day research in software process improvement (SPI). Nevertheless, there is no available study that provides detail review of the published software process improvement SLRs. Objective: The aim of this article is to classify the SLRs of SPI in order to identify the main research areas covered and evaluate the quality of the published SLRs. Methodology: A tertiary study was conducted to review the SLRs published by other researchers on the topic of SPI. Results: Twenty-four SLR articles were identified in the field of SPI. Results show that the quality of the selected SLRs on SPI is decreasing over the recent years. The most popular research topics are factors affecting SPI and process models. Conclusions: This study provides the review and state of the art in the context of SPI research. The results of this article would be of great interest for future SPI researchers by providing in depth understanding of various research areas in SPI. The number of process improvement SLRs is increasing and the overall quality is decreasing, which could lessen their potential impact on SPI practice. Currently, SPI literature is weak in the knowledge areas such as quality and software testing process improvement.

A practitioner’s guide to light weight software process assessment and improvement planning

Calculating Software Process Improvement's Return on Investment

SUMMARYFor the effective promotion of software process improvement (SPI) activities in a large organization, it is necessary to establish an organizational structure and a deployment method for promotion and to develop training courses, support tools, and other materials. Even if an organizational promotion system is established, the SPI activities of each development department cannot be promoted effectively without an SPI community. To promote SPI activities throughout Toshiba Group, we organized a Corporate Software Engineering Process Group in April 2000. We also proposed an SPI framework. This framework extracts the features of organizations in which improvement activities were successful in the 1990s and combines them systematically. For over 10 years, we have been constructing Toshiba's SPI framework based on the SPI framework that we proposed and promoting process improvement activities using it. As a result, maturity levels were improved in many development departments, and the applicability of the SPI framework has been confirmed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Software process and product improvement: an empirical assessment

This paper presents a model that can be used to measure the readiness of an organization to engage in a software process improvement (SPI) program. This model focuses on the main stakeholders of an SPI program, which include the “Sponsor”, the “Change Agent”, and the “Organization” directly affected by the improvements. The model identifies the drivers that motivate the SPI main stakeholders and assigns metrics to these drivers so that it is possible to evaluate the readiness of the whole organization to start and maintain an SPI program. The model presented augments the concepts of “Change Management” from the Software Engineering Institute by incorporating the experiences of ABB in implementing SPI programs in its business units during the past decade. The paper presents as well an example on how this model has been used to track the evolution of SPI in an ABB organization.

Software Process Improvement (SPI) has become one of the main strategic objectives in software industry. Companies make more investments in implementing software quality standards and models that focus on process assessment to improve their performance and productivity. To achieve these goals, companies focus on improving their process by means of improvement initiatives which may be implemented. To help practitioners find more innovative ways to manage and implement software process improvement initiatives efficiently, an important number of studies related to this topic have been emerged in recent years. Some of them, referred to as secondary studies, focused on the interpretation and synthesis of available published research works by giving an up to date state of art about SPI. This state of the art is provided in a form of literature surveys or in a methodological form using well established approaches such as systematic reviews or systematic mappings or tertiary studies. The objective of this paper is to identify and present the current secondary studies on SPI. The purpose is to discuss methods that these literature reviews of SPI use, their quality, and specific subjects that they cover. A set of survey research questions have been proposed and discussed through the investigation of 70 selected secondary studies collected from different digital libraries. The results show that success factors and issues related to implementation of SPI initiatives are the most studied, and there is a need to address in depth the measurement aspects in SPI.

The importance of software process improvement (SPI) is gaining increasing acknowledgement in software companies. Many companies have started SPI and try to extend it in all the functional units. However, some units may have problems initiating SPI. In this paper an initial level requirements and design practice assessment is presented. The assessment was conducted with a method that was specifically developed to pay attention to the organizational readiness for SPI and trying to obtain organizational support for it. The study summarizes the findings that establish a solid understanding of the current practices in the company, and identify concrete improvement areas. Even if the assessment method needs to be customized for each company, the case study suggests that it can help to establish a positive attitude towards SPI.

The emerging international standard ISO/IEC 15504 on ‘Information Technology – Software Process Assessment’ aims to harmonize the various assessment approaches used in software process improvement (SPI). While approaches based on the organization-focused ‘staged model’ (SW-CMM etc.) provide a ‘roadmap’ generally true for most organizations, the process-focused ‘continuous model’ of ISO/IEC 15504 does not prescribe any particular improvement path. SPI projects using the ISO/IEC 15504 approach are thus considered to have to deal with increased complexity in improvement planning. Targeting this problem, the basic ideas behind a generalized system dynamics model of ‘a set of improving software processes’ currently under development to support SPI action planning at a tactical level are presented. The basic intention is to determine the impact of a set of scheduled improvement actions on the strategic target variables of SPI (time-to-market, cost, quality). The approach integrates the two main ‘mental models’ behind ISO/IEC 15504: the process model described textually as a network of processes and work products, and the model of maturing single processes. The development of the model is oriented at organizations with lower capability and medium sized development projects. The results of preceding software process assessments are used as a major source for model initialization. How simulation can support software process improvement is discussed, and insights from sample applications are presented. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

A systematic literature review on software measurement programs

Agile software development solutions are targeted at enhancing work at project level. Little is yet known about the relationship between agile projects and organizational capability improvement. The agile project teams are suggested to iteratively improve their behaviour in a validated manner. This paper addresses the high value of such validated software process improvement (SPI) knowledge emerging from project teams and its utilization at the organizational level SPI. In this paper it is suggested that the novel SPI methods of agile project teams also require alterations in the activities of the organizational level in order to enable the mutually benefiting coexistence of the two. Empirical results from a longitudinal case study over Jive software development projects are presented to illustrate the evolvement of organizational SPI mechanisms and to derive implications for integrating the agile software development and organizational SPI. This study reveals the high importance of close collaboration between the organizational and project levels throughout the projects and identifies several organizational activities needed in enhancing SPI within agile projects and in an organization.

Systematic literature review and empirical investigation of barriers to process improvement in global software development: Client–vendor perspective