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The development of large, business-critical software systems often requires several improvement cycles. There are many users and stakeholders involved, as well as a variety of large and complex business processes. However, such an iterative or evolutionary development process can be costly and time-consuming, when problems are reported slowly and changes take time. We propose a technical approach to generate user interfaces for SOA systems and to weave an experience forum service into the system. By tightly integrating the experience exchange mechanisms with the system itself, we benefit from SOA being so closely related to business processes. We use lessons learned in building experience bases: Generating both user interfaces and experience forum components provides opportunities to index and relate feedback automatically. This has been a key to effective experience reuse. Improved feedback and more effective communication can make SOA-based development of large software systems faster and less costly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes an industrial case study assessing software replacement success and other effects. The target of assessments has been a large commercial legacy system for customer register management. The success of its replacement by its performed rewrite has been assessed via four approaches concerning: user satisfaction, strengths and problems of the system, problem surveillance and expert judgments. The approaches and metrics have been selected in cooperation with industrial experts in order that they would meet the needs of their organization. The assessments have been conducted by comparing the situations before and after the rewrite. They have included quality aspects. The applied approaches have supplemented each other well and results provided by them have been mainly consistent. The study has offered a wide view of the system replacement effects and lessons for the replacement assessment process improvement in industrial settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Offshore outsourcing and teams working across national borders have become a fact. Management experiences difficulties when applying traditional management approaches, because of the increased complexity of global organizations and global partnerships and their dependency on people with different underlying norms, values and beliefs. Cultural sensitivity is a core issue. Trust, an issue embedded in culture, is utmost important for global organizations and global outsourcing partnerships. In this paper we investigate the phenomenon of trust by analyzing the characteristics, their interconnection and identification in the software outsourcing context. Our findings reveal the importance of trust in software outsourcing relationships and the recognition that trust is culture bound and therefore prompts for special caution and cultural awareness. The advantages gained in outsourcing relationships which could demonstrate trust between partners were improved communication, efficiency and output of Information Systems (IS) development projects, as well as mitigation of opportunistic behavior. Keywords: Trust, Outsourcing, Global Organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One way of implementing Software Process Improvement (SPI) is to empower employees to carry out decisions made by management. An alternative way is to invite developers and project leaders to participate in all phases of planning and implementing SPI projects. Such participation has always been a central goal and one of the pillars of organization development and change, and has also been shown to be one of the factors with the strongest influence on SPI success. However, there are few studies reporting how participation can be done in practice in software companies doing SPI. In this paper, we describe how long-term participation can be realized in various SPI initiatives using several participation techniques like search conferences, survey feedback, autonomous work groups, quality circles, and learning meetings. The research has been carried out in a small Norwegian software company called Kongsberg Spacetec, over a period of eight years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International software standards and maturity models play an important role in Software Process Improvement initiatives defining best practices and providing knowledge to the definition of software processes. Nevertheless, the definition and deployment of software processes based on that standards and models is an expensive and knowledge intensive task. This paper describes an approach to the definition and deployment of software processes in small and medium size Brazilian companies supported by a Process-centered Software Engineering Environment named Taba Workstation. It also presents results related to a software process improvement initiative undertaken in a Brazilian organization that demonstrates the feasibility of the presented approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing adoption of agile methods for software development is amplifying the message that people are one of the most critical success factors of any software project. This paper addresses two fundamental questions that arise in that context: How can we capture, make explicit and effectively communicate human attitudes, beliefs and ways of thinking that influence individual and team work in projects? How can we supplement software process methods and support tools in order to take into account such human factors explicitly, systematically and effectively? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software process modeling is gaining acceptance because of the evolving Software Process Engineering Metamodel (SPEM) language. While carrying out empirical process research in software companies in order to model reusable process components with SPEM, we have faced issues that concern Software Process Improvement (SPI) more generally. To understand the general context we have structured these issues into five important aspects of SPI. In this paper we present each aspect through its challenges and opportunities from the process modeling point of view. Consequently, we claim that by overcoming the challenges, process modeling will bring new concrete opportunities for SPI.This paper is based on work done during the ReProCo research project (Sub-project of the E!3320 project) in co-operation with Genestia Group Inc. - Neoxen Systems and Devera Software Development Center. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software development processes are subject to variations in time and space, variations that can originate from learning effects, differences in application domains, or a number of other causes. Identifying and analyzing such differences is crucial for a variety of process activities, like defining and evolving process standards, or analyzing the compliance of process models to existing standards, among others. In this paper, we show why appropriately identifying, describing, and visualizing differences between process models in order to support such activities is a highly challenging task. We present scenarios that motivate the need for process model difference analysis, and describe the conceptual and technical challenges arising from them. In addition, we sketch an initial tool-based approach implementing difference analysis, and contrast it with similar existing approaches. The results from this paper constitute the requirements for our ongoing development effort, whose objectives we also describe briefly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many ways to model software development processes. This paper reports a feature analysis of four process modeling techniques using criteria specified by a software development organization. The evaluation used a single process, peer review, modeled using all four techniques. Performing the modeling activity highlighted the usefulness of the modeling activity and the usefulness of metamodels in structuring processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measurement is an important factor in Software Process Improvement, but many organizations have difficulties in establishing and utilizing metrics programs. Our ongoing research project Software Measurement (SoMe) is aimed at creating a set of tools to help in measuring and improving the quality of software products and processes. In this paper we present the current state of measurement in the Finnish software companies participating in our project and the experience they have gained. The research is based on a series of interviews and questionnaires, created to collect the experiences the companies have about individual metrics and measurement in general. These results show which process groups the measurement is focused on, and who are the beneficiaries of the measurement results in practice. Keywords:Measurement,metrics,quality,software process improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The application of statistical process control (SPC) techniques for software is rare due to such requirements as high maturity, rational sampling, and effective metric selection. Existing studies report results from their own implementations and provide suggestions for success. In this paper, we explain an approach used for assessing the suitability of software process and metrics for starting SPC implementation via control charts. The approach includes guidance to identify rational samples of a process as well as to select process metrics. We explain the application of the approach over a review process of a software and system development organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We know from the software process improvement (SPI) literature that new technologies are often acquired, but not deployed. Fichmand and Kemerer call this phenomenon the assimilation gap. Important prerequisites to SPI success are SPI implementation success and SPI initiative progress. This study presents four simple and practical indicators for SPI initiatives to stay focused on deployment and facilitate SPI initiative progress. These practical indicators are easy to gather, manage and evaluate and they provide an organization with useful information to determine the progress of an SPI initiative. The indicators focus on competence build-up, employee capabilities, process adoption and management commitment. The result shows there are simple and practical indicators for tracking and follow-up SPI initiatives' progress to stay focused on deployment and decrease the assimilation gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article three cases of small or medium sized software companies acquiring companies of the same or smaller size are analyzed from the software process point of view. The analysis shows that the problems in those acquisitions are fairly common and the types of those problems are fairly similar in different cases. Although those acquisitions have the potential to satisfy their goals of complementing or improving the product portfolio or the customer base of the companies, the actual success of the acquisitions may not be as good as expected. The main reasons for the relative unsuccessfulness of the analyzed cases seem to be the lack of proper planning for the merger and communication problems which hinder effective and high-quality work in the new post-acquisition organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process of globalization expands with each year along with the growing complexity of software development. Outsourcing transforms a common way of producing software to distributed software life cycle activities among teams separated by various boundaries, such as contextual, organizational, cultural, temporal, geographical, and political. Risks associated with these boundaries make managers struggle with pressures unique to this type of environment. In this paper we describe a research that aims to investigate the nature of global risks and build a comprehensive and easy to use framework for risk management. We emphasize the necessity of awareness about global factors and threats that distinguish distributed projects and require adequate attention throughout the project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the results of a case study focusing on improving the software problem management process in TietoEnator Oyj. The research question is what kind of challenges are related to the software problem management process. As main findings, we show a list of challenges identified during the study. Those challenges include the increasing number of open and duplicate problems in the problem database, difficulties in combining existing problem management concepts with ITIL-based concepts, a lack of performance metrics such as incident turnaround times, and a lack of knowledge base. The main contribution of this study is to help IT organizations to identify the challenges and problems that are related to ITIL-based problem management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of a Grounded Theory study of how software process and software process improvement (SPI) is applied in the practice of software development. This study described in this paper focused on what is actually happening in practice in the software industry. Using the indigenous Irish software product industry as a test-bed, we examine the approaches used to develop software by companies at various stages of growth. The study used the grounded theory methodology and the results produce a picture of software process usage, with the outcome being a theory, grounded in the field data, that explains how software processes are formed and evolve, and when and why SPI is undertaken. The grounded theory is based on two conceptual themes, Process Formation and Process Evolution, and one core theoretical category, Cost of Process. Our research found that SPI programmes are implemented reactively and that many software managers reject SPI because of the associated implementation and maintenance costs and are reluctant to implement SPI models such as ISO 9000 and CMMI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a case study of how a Norwegian company introduced an ISO certified process. By identifying the company's strong and weak sides plus the expectations and fears of the developers, we managed to introduce process changes in an efficient manner. By reusing the existing processes and procedures used in the company, the additions needed in order to be ISO 9001confromant was surprisingly small - only 37 pages. The way we worked to achieve our goal can serve as a starting point to other companies that are in the same situation as our company - a company with lots of good processes and procedures but without the framework needed to make it ISO 9001 conform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an action research study, we describe the application of the scrum software development process in a small cross-organizational development project. The stakeholders in the project report many of the benefits we have found in previous studies, such as increased overview of the project, flexibility and motivation. In addition, we have found that estimation can be challenging in cross-organizational projects due to the customer-provider relationship between the participating organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This book constitutes the refereed research proceeding of the 13th European Software Process Improvement Conference, EuroSPI 2006, held in Joensuu, Finland in October 2006. The 18 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 62 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on SPI (Software Process Improvement) processes, SPI and risk management, measurement, process modelling, human factors, and implementation of SPI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter presents a case study from a global company developing a new generation of programmable controllers to replace several existing products. The system needs to incorporate support for a large number of I/O systems, network types, and communication protocols. To leverage its global development resources and the competency of different development centers, the company decided to adopt a component-based software architecture that allows I/O and communication functions to be realized by independently developed components. The architecture incorporates a subset of a standard component model. The process of redesigning the software architecture is presented, along with the experiences made during and after the project. An analysis of these experiences shows that the component-based architecture effectively supports distributed development and that the effort required for implementing certain functionality has been substantially reduced while, at the same time, the system’s performance and other run-time quality attributes have been kept on a satisfactory level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reuse of different types of experience is a key issue in successful improvement in software engineering. The approach taken in the Quality Improvement Paradigm (QIP) and its supporting organisation, the Experience Factory (EF), is to define an Experience Base (EB), where all types of reusable objects are organised and stored. The objects may be of any type related to software development, for example, code, methods, quality models and specifications. Furthermore, not only objects identical to the target object needed can be reused, but also similar ones. This paper defines important concepts in a reuse context, elaborates a reuse scenario from which the requirements for the implementation of an Experience Base are derived. A list of 22 technical requirements is defined which cover the functional aspects related to the use of an Experience Base. The evaluation of three alternative implementation approaches are presented as an example: two database alternatives and one based on Case-Based Reasoning (CBR). Future work is to investigate the costs for extending the functionality to fulfil the requirements and to use the requirements in a real setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]