Improving Professional Software Skills in Industry A Training Experiment

With over a decade of Software Process Improvement in large organisations, the awareness of its importance has propagated to Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs). The most well known models for SPI are primarily suited for largeor medium-sized organisations, but with some tailoring they can provide substantial support for SPI in small organisations. The IPSSI (Improving Professional Software Skills in Europe) project aims to address these issues and provide a process improvement framework for use by individual software engineers working in European SMEs. This paper describes the background and motivation behind the IPSSI framework and describes the IPSSI approach to supporting the individual software engineer and reports on a series of case studies using the IPSSI method.