Process Improvement for Small Organizations

S oftware process improvement (SPI) has been a hot topic within the software industry for a number of years. Its high profile has been due in part to the introduction and industry acceptance of standard improvement models , most notably the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) 1 developed by the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Large organizations , such as Motorola's Government Electronics Division with 1,500 software engineers, have successfully implemented SPI initiatives and reaped significant benefits. 2 For smaller organizations, these benefits are no less significant, but smaller organizations often operate under different constraints. For a small organization to introduce and sustain a process improvement initiative, it must minimize the limitations of its smaller size and maximize the benefits inherent in its culture. In this article, we describe an approach to SPI that has been used successfully in an organization of approximately 150 software engineers. Our approach involved as many software engineers as possible while avoiding disruption to ongoing projects. The ratio of the effort required to implement a CMM-based SPI initiative in a company of 1,500 software engineers and a company of 150 software engineers will not be 10:1. In fact, for the core activities, excluding training and support, the effort required will not be significantly different. Clearly, the investment that a larger company can afford will usually be significantly greater than the investment that a smaller company can justify. Therefore, smaller organizations have an even more acute need to use SPI resources efficiently ; if they don't, the cost of SPI can become prohibitively expensive. Significant cultural differences exist between small organizations and larger ones. In smaller organizations , employees expect to be involved in all aspects of the software engineering process. Often, this practice is a result of the company's history. When a software company starts off with a handful of people, by necessity, everyone is involved in all aspects of software development. As these start-up companies grow, they often retain this culture of involvement. On the other hand, large organizations can leverage significant efficiency improvements by, for example, having a dedicated group choose computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools or standards. Therefore, in a large organization, it is not unusual for decisions about the software process to be made outside the software engineering groups. In contrast, software engineers in smaller organizations expect to influence decisions that affect the way they work. The culture of smaller …