We present a refined version of a meta-model process modeling framework that can be effectively used to identify key practices to initiate and sustain a software process improvement effort focused on a single process area. Our approach moves away from the overall software development process and computation of maturity levels and focuses on a particular process area or task and its key practice...

Agile distributed environments pose particular challenges related to control of quality and collaboration in software development. Moreover, while face-to-face interaction is fundamental in agile development, distributed environments must rely extensively on mediated interactions. On this backdrop, we report from an in-depth case study of an agile distributed software project. Applying Kirsch’s...

Managing software project stress is the key to improving software quality and productivity. Software development is a complex intellectual process involving precise communication of abstract concepts across multiple discipline boundaries. Optimum stress maximizes communication effectiveness and the ability to deal with complexity.

In this paper the approach to the software project dynamics research and optimisation is presented. This approach is based on the Measurement, Modelling and Management of the software development process (the MMM approach). We propose to collect the statistics data of such software project parameters as software product size, requirements size, effort, duration, staff number, costs, etc. in ord...

10 A successful software project is the result of a complex process involving, above all, people. Developers are the key factors for the success of a software development process, not merely as executors of tasks, but as protagonists and core of the whole development process. This paper investigates social aspects among developers working on software projects developed with the support of Agile...

In this paper, we describe the Software Tag which makes software development visible to software purchasers (users). A software tag is a partial set of empirical data about a software development project shared between the purchaser and developer. The purchaser uses the software tag to evaluate the software project, allowing them to recognize the quality level of the processes and products invo...

Software project management has always faced challenges that have often had a great impact on the outcome of projects in future. For this, Managers of software projects always seek solutions against challenges. The implementation of unguaranteed approaches or mere personal experiences by managers does not necessarily suffice for solving the problems. Therefore, the management area of software p...

Software development processes are often not explicitly modelled and sometimes even chaotic. In order to keep track of the involved documents and files, engineers use software configuration management systems. Along the way, those systems collect and store information on the software development process itself. In this paper, we show how this information can be used for constructing explicit pr...

Dependencies in a software project can contribute to unsatisfactory progress if they constrain or block the flow of work. Various studies highlight the importance of dependencies in the organisation of work; however dependencies in agile software development projects have not previously been a research focus. Drawing on three case studies of agile software projects, and the IS literature, this ...

The importance of people factors for the success of software development is commonly accepted, because the success of a software project is above all determined by having the right people on the right place at the right time. As software development is a knowledge intensive industry; the `quality' of developers is primarily determined by their knowledge and skills. This paper presents a concept...