Abstract. Understanding how to implement SPI successfully is arguably the most challenging issue facing the SPI field today. The SPI literature contains many case studies of successful companies and descriptions of their SPI programs. However, there has been no systematic attempt to synthesize and organize the prescriptions offered. The research efforts to date are limited and inconclusive and without adequate theoretical and psychometric justification. This paper provides a synthesis of prescriptions for successful quality management and process improvement found from an extensive review of the quality management, organizational learning, and software process improvement literature. The literature review was confirmed by empirical studies among both researchers and practitioners. The main result is an instrument for measuring the key factors of success in SPI based on data collected from 120 software organizations. The measures were found to have satisfactory psychometric properties. Hence, managers can use the instrument to guide SPI activities in their respective organizations and researchers can use it to build models to relate the facilitating factors to both learning processes and SPI outcomes.

Most quality and software process improvement frameworks emphasize written (i.e. formal) documentation to convey recommended work practices. However, there is considerable skepticism among developers to learn from and adhere to prescribed process models. The latter are often perceived as overly "structured" or implying too much "control". Further, what is relevant knowledge has often been decided by "others" - often the quality manager.

Abstract—Understanding how to implement software process improvement (SPI) successfully is arguably the most challenging issue facing the SPI field today. The SPI literature contains many case studies of successful companies and descriptions of their SPI programs. However, the research efforts to date are limited and inconclusive and without adequate theoretical and psychometric justification. This paper extends and integrates models from prior research by performing an empirical investigation of the key factors for success in SPI. A quantitative survey of 120 software organizations was designed to test the conceptual model and hypotheses of the study. The results indicate that success depends critically on six organizational factors, which explained more than 50 percent of the variance in the outcome variable. The main contribution of the paper is to increase the understanding of the influence of organizational issues by empirically showing that they are at least as important as technology for succeeding with SPI and, thus, to provide researchers and practitioners with important new insights regarding the critical factors of success in SPI.

Abstract not found

Abstract. While most agile methodologies assume that change is inevitable, current approaches have adopted the strategy of defining practices and activities that are general enough to be adapted to many project settings. These methodologies have the ability to address variance and adaptability within the processes, but are unable to adopt different methodologies to meet the evolving needs of projects as they progress through their lifecycles, or change to meet new business or user conditions. For example, a project may begin with a Scrumbased process, but require some XP processes or even heavyweight processes later in the lifecycle. Agile methodologies should be able to react to these changes with appropriate practices and processes that fit project needs at any point in time. In this paper, we describe a methodology generator, a tool that can create hybrid approaches to software development spanning from the most simple to the agile to the heavyweight, depending on project needs. A rule based system is combined with an experience-based feedback mechanism to define the conditions under which a given methodology, process, or activity is applicable to

In this longitudinal case study we have followed a small software product company that has turned from a waterfall-like process to evolutionary project management (Evo). The most prominent feature of the new process is the close engagement of customers. We have interviewed both internals and customers to investigate the practicalities, costs, gains and prerequisites of such a transition. We have gathered data from a period of two years covering four consecutive release projects using the new process and analyzed the material in detail. Our findings implicate that close customer engagement does give certain benefits but that it comes with a cost and needs careful attention to management.

The Global Studio Project integrated the work of Software Engineering students spread across four countries into a single project and represented, for most of the students, their first major “real-world ” development experience. Interviews indicated that the major areas of learning were informal skills that included learning to establish and work effectively within a team, learning how to react quickly to frequent changes in requirements, architecture and organization, and learning to manage and optimize communications. Since all these skills require rapid reaction to unpredictable factors, we view them as improvisation and discuss the role of experiential education in facilitating improvisation.

Experience-based approaches to software development promise to capture critical knowledge from software projects that can be used as a basis for continuous improvement of software development practices. Putting these ideas into practice in the quickly evolving discipline of software engineering has proven elusive. Techniques and tools are needed that help software practitioners apply past knowledge to current projects while engaging in knowledge creation processes. This paper outlines the experience factory and organizational learning approaches, both of which explore how experience-based approaches to software development can be used to improve software development practices. A software tool is used to investigate how these two approaches can be integrated to create an approach that addresses many issues of knowledge

We introduce electronic process guides, and discuss their role in software engineering projects. We then present existing methods for constructing electronic process guides by defining a set of common processes for a company. Different approaches from the software engineering and management science are presented. We then go on to propose a new way of dealing with process description in software engineering: using process workshops as a tool to reach consensus on work practice. The main reason for this is to get realistic descriptions with accurate detail as well as company commitment in an efficient manner. We describe our workshop-oriented method to define processes, which we have used in small software companies, and show examples of results.

Abstract. Mentor programs are important mechanisms that serve functions such as career development as well as knowledge transfer. Many see mentor programs as an efficient, inexpensive, flexible and tailored way of transferring technical knowledge from experts to less experienced employees. We have investigated how a mentor program works in a small software consultancy company, and propose that the learning effect of the program could be improved by introducing methods to increase the employees level of reflection. 1.