A longitudinal study of software process management in Taiwan ’ s top companies

 Managing the software development process has been an important issue in the IT field. Since the mid-1980s, the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) has been exploring effective ways of managing the software development process. In 1987, SEI proposed a software process maturity framework (Humphrey & Sweet, 1987). Later in 1991, it further announced the capability maturity model (CMM) (Paulk et al., 1991). Since then, there has been a rapidly growing number of software organizations adopting the CMM as a framework for internal improvement initiatives, including commercial organizations. This study surveys the IT organizations of the top 1000 business companies in Taiwan. It explores the status of software process management (SPM) in these companies and compares the findings with a similar study done in 1996. It further compares the SPM status with Japanese and US data reported in the literature. Finally, it identifies the weaknesses of the surveyed companies and recommends corrective actions for improving their software processes.