Six Theses on Software Process Research

Over the past two years the software process community has initiated and carried out a re ection on the purpose and scope of the research activities being carried out in the area. This has increased the awareness that there are many similarities between the problems and approaches of the software process technology community and those attacked by other research elds: software process improvement, information systems and work ow, databases, distributed technology, computer-supported cooperative work, groupware, and organizational and cognitive sciences. A number of events and initiatives have been launched to establish bridges and connections among these communities [E. 98] [ics98] [isp98] [wor98] [RDP97] [WAC99]. These initiatives have reasonably demonstrated that it is urgent and mandatory (a) to ll the gaps among these di erent disciplines to develop a common baseline of concepts and principles, and (b) to jointly exploit the results that each community has independently produced. It is quite easy to state these goals. In practice, pursuing them is much more di cult than expected. This is due to a variety of reasons, the rst one being the presence of several misconceptions and misunderstandings that still make it di cult to pursue an open and e ective exchange of opinions and experiences. Being this just a position paper, we do not have the ambition of providing solid conceptual and technological contributions to solve these problems. Moreover, we will be purposely provocative, thus pushing the argument to its extreme. Indeed, our intention is just to provide a small contribution to further support the discussion and re ection of the community on the above issues. To achieve this goal, the paper proposed a few theses that represent and synthesize our understanding of the problem, based on the research and experimental work that we have accomplished over the past 8 years. Each thesis is brie y illustrated and justi ed. In addition, we provide a sketchy indication of the possible impacts that these theses might have on our research work.