Software Development Process Improvement Framework (SDPIF) for Small Software Development Firms (SSDFs)

Most of the software development organizations all over the world are Small Software Development Firms (SSDFs). These firms have realized that it is necessary to organize and improve their software development and management activities. Traditional software process improvement (SPI) models and standards are generally not possible to be implemented directly by SSDFs, as these firms are not capable of investing the cost of implementing these programs due to limited resources and strict deadlines to complete the projects. In addition, the existing regional SPI models which were developed for SSDFs are not suitable to be implemented by SSDFs all over the world. Furthermore, SSDFs also have ignored the software development practices to explain “how to do the improvement”; as they only focus on “what to do for improvement”. This paper presents a new software development process improvement framework (SDPIF) for SSDFs based on eXtreme programming (XP) as the software development method and Capability Maturity Model Integration version 1.2 for Development (CMMI-Dev1.2) as the SPI model.