Trends in the Research on Software Process Improvement in Scandinavia

found wide acceptance in the Nordic countries in engineering oriented communities and especially in the telecommunications industry and has been deeply rooted there ever since and various, related, partly proprietary methods were developed. Thomsen & Mayhew (1998) give a good introduction into the various approaches. Research and technology transfer agencies like Delta in Denmark, Tieke in Finland, Sintef in Norway, IVF in Sweden-hardly known to the readers of this journal-promote these approaches in and beyond their countries and represent parts of a lively software process improvement community which however does not (very) actively participate in the research community interested in both software engineering and information systems issues as represented by the Information Systems Research seminar in Scandinavia (IRIS) and the SJIS. Finnish colleagues participated in the development of a European assessment and improvement approach called Bootstrap which was particularly directed towards small and medium sized software enterprises (Kuvaja et al., 1994). As a growing number of slightly differing approaches emerged, Finnish and Icelandic researchers got involved in the attempt to standardise these methodologies in a scheme called SPICE Process Group Conference to name just a few-developed and journals like SOFTWARE PROCESS-Improvement and Practice and several special issues and feature articles f. ex. in IEEE Software are regularly devoted to the topic. In 1994 the Commission of the This volume of the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems (SJIS) deals with 'Tends in the Research on Software Process Improvement in Scandinavia'. Since its very beginning software development struggled with unfinished projects, budget and time overruns, erroneous systems and systems with lacking functionality. Numerous attempts to solve these problems by introducing methodologies and methods ranging from structured programming to object-oriented analysis and design-the term 'software engineering' itself was coined as a remedy-and by promoting technical support as provided by f. ex. CASE tools, have only lead to limited success. Software process improvement (SPI) is a field of research and practice which as a consequence focuses on managerial and process-oriented aspects of software development. It emerged in the 1980ties as a result of an US Department of Defence initiative to get a methodology to evaluate the capability of their software contractors. The approach is based on the assumption that the quality of the development process has an influence on the quality of the product and got widely known through W. Humphrey's book from 1989 'Managing the Software Process' (Humphrey, 1989) which presented the capability …