In the early writing on software process improvement (SPI), it was suggested that the group of people responsible for designing and implementing the SPI system should apply the principles of SPI on themselves, making sure their own processes were no less mature than the processes they were trying to improve. Looking at maturity level theory from various literature sources, it seems reasonable t...

This paper describes research on the perceived impact of process improvement activities on the quality of the services provided to the (internal) customers. A questionnaire was developed to map the notion 'quality of service' from the point of view from both ITdepartments and business customers. These assessments were measures against a subjective scale that runs from 'insufficient' to 'suffici...

Literature and practice has agreed that commitment plays an important role in software process improvement (SPI)[1] initiatives. However, the concept of commitment has not been seriously researched in the SPI community. This paper seeks to provide a synthesis of contemporary commitment literature – giving SPI research and practice a new perspective on the phenomenon. It is shown that current th...

This paper presents a comprehensive overview of all the important areas within Software Product Management (SPM). The overview has been created and validated in collaboration with many experts from practice and the scientific community. It provides a list of 68 capabilities a product software organization should implement to reach a full grown SPM maturity. The overview consists of the SPM Comp...

Software process engineering has not been introduced in most small software organizations because of the high cost of implementing it. RAMALA is a knowledge base, supported by a software tool which is also called RAMALA. This knowledge base contains a software process framework based mainly on PMBOK [9], using the best practices of the main software process reference models such as CMMI [11] an...

In this paper we present the results of a reanalysis of a study of factors that influence the success of software process improvement [6]. The initial report relied on simple statistical analytic methods, largely univariate and bivariate statistics. The current multivariate analysis replicates the basic results of the earlier study, while adding additional insights about the interactions among ...

Software development organizations are focusing on improving the process of software development so that the resultant software is of high quality and the development cost is low from the viewpoint of the competitive advantage. Software process improvement (SPI) is a methodical and continuous improvement approach for the software development processes to develop quality software. SPI establishe...

Software process improvement methods help to continuously refine and adjust the software process to improve its performance (e.g., in terms of leadtime, quality of the software product, reduction of change requests, and so forth). Lean software development propagates two important principles that help process improvement, namely identification of waste in the process and considering interaction...

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Narrow focus is the key to success for organizations of all kinds and sizes. Focus can be diluted by emphasizing the "wrong kind" of software process improvement. That's right: traditional software process improvement may impede the successful development and deliver software, particularly innovative and total solutions. In fact, adherence to traditional software process improvement can cause a...