Today, the software industry is one of the most rapidly growing sectors and small software development companies play an important role in economy. Many such organizations have been interested in Software Process Improvement (SPI). It has been observed that the successful implementation of SPI methodologies is generally not possible within the context of small and medium-sized software enterpri...

Measurement is progressively becoming a mainstream management tool to help ICT organizations plan, monitor and control. However, measurement itself is not a mature domain of knowledge in software engineering. The assessment of proposed measurement indicators in these process improvement models is investigated, and a methodology is proposed for the design of a measurement indicator assessment gr...

A software quality management system (QMS) has been designed in a democratic fashion by programmers and has been approved by management. In order to motivate the programmers in following their own standards, measurement feedback is used for creating social pressure (peer pressure and management pressure). In nine out of ten cases this approach has been successful. Could the failure of the tenth...

In this paper we present findings from our recent empirical study of software process improvement (SPI) implementation critical barriers (CBs) in twenty-six Australian software companies. The objective of this study is to summarise the issues that playa negative role in the implementation of SPI programmes and to identify the key barriers. Through our empirical study we identified 5 barriers (o...

Data from 13 organizations were collected and analyzed to obtain information on the results of CMM-based software process improvement efforts. We report the cost and business value of improvement efforts, as well as the yearly improvement in productivity, early defect detection, time to market, and post-release defect reports. Improvement efforts and results in five organizations are reported i...

Literature [Gra97] claims that up to 70% of software process improvement initiatives fail to achieve their intended goals. No single organization is likely to have the range of experience necessary to identify these critical factors. We need to examine abroad sample of projects undergoing SPI in order to determine characteristics that successful SPI efforts have in common, characteristics that ...

SUMMARY Structured approaches are beneficial for successful software process improvement (SPI). However, process engineers often struggle with standardized SPI methods, such as CMMI or ISO 15504, and complain about too generic or voluminous approaches, or methods that are alien to the organizations in which SPI is conducted. Therefore, process engineers need to customize existing SPI models or ...

......................................................................................................................................... 2 CONTENTS .......................................................................................................................................... 3

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 Finl...

The growing importance of software for products as well as processes has been recognised in several ABB companies. As a result they started initiatives to improve their software development. Unlike other improvement programmes in industry, ABB‘s software process improvement initiatives are not part of company-wide, globally controlled programme. They rather evolved locally in different ABB comp...