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In this article, we present a categorization of CMMI Specific Practices, and use this to reanalyze prior work describing the perceived value of those practices for Small-to-Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), in order to better understand the software engineering practice needs of SMEs. Our categorization is based not on process areas, but on outcome areas (covering organizational, process, project, and product outcomes) and on the nature of activities leading to outcomes in those areas (covering planning, doing, checking, and improvement activities). Our reanalysis of the perceived value of Specific Practices for the CMMI Level 2 Process Areas shows that SMEs most value practices for working on project-related outcomes, and for planning and doing work on product-related outcomes. Our categorization of practices will serve as a framework for further study about CMMI and other SPI approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to obtain a baseline snapshot of Project Management processes using a two-phase questionnaire to identify both performed and non-performed practices. The proposed questionnaire is based on the Level 2 process areas of the Capability Maturity Model Integration for Development v1.2. It is expected that the application of the questionnaire to the processes will help small and medium software enterprises to identify those practices which are performed but not documented, which practices need more attention, and which are not implemented due to bad management or unawareness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essential characteristic of mature software and system development organizations is the definition and use of explicit process models. For a number of reasons, it can be valuable to produce new process models by tailoring existing process standards (such as the V-Modell XT). Both process models and standards evolve over time in order to integrate improvements or adapt the process models to context changes. An important challenge for a process engineering team is to keep tailored process models aligned over time with the standards originally used to produce them. This article presents an approach that supports the alignment of process standards evolving in parallel to derived process models, using an actual industrial example to illustrate the problems and potential solutions. We present and discuss the results of a quantitative analysis done to determine whether a strongly tailored model can still be aligned with its parent standard and to assess the potential cost of such an alignment. We close the paper with conclusions and outlook. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper summarizes multifaceted synergies discovered between the ISO/IEC 15408 (Common Criteria) IT Security Evaluation standard, software product quality evaluation standards and the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI). In addition to serving research motivated interest, the usefulness of the synergies is demonstrated through case studies related to significant systems development projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Improving software processes relies on the ability to analyze previous projects and derive which parts of the process that should be focused on for improvement. All software projects encounter software faults during development and have to put much effort into locating and fixing these. A lot of information is produced when handling faults, through fault reports. This paper reports a study of fault reports from industrial projects, where we seek a better understanding of faults that have been reported during development and how this may affect the quality of the system. We investigated the fault profiles of five business-critical industrial projects by data mining to explore if there were significant trends in the way faults appear in these systems. We wanted to see if any types of faults dominate, and whether some types of faults were reported as being more severe than others. Our findings show that one specific fault type is generally dominant across reports from all projects, and that some fault types are rated as more severe than others. From this we could propose that the organization studied should increase effort in the design phase in order to improve software quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Test-driven development (TDD) is entering the mainstream of software development. We examined the software development process for the purpose of evaluation of the TDD impact, with respect to software development productivity, in the context of a web based system development. The design of the study is based on Goal-Question-Metric approach, and may be easily replicated in different industrial contexts where the number of subjects involved in the study is limited. The study reveals that TDD may have positive impact on software development productivity. Moreover, TDD is characterized by the higher ratio of active development time (described as typing and producing code) in total development time than test-last development approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Continuous improvement of software development capability is fundamental for organizations to thrive in competitive markets. Nevertheless, Software Process Improvement (SPI) initiatives have demonstrated limited results because SPI managers usually fail to cope with factors that have influence on the success of SPI. In this paper, we present the results of a multi-strategy approach aiming to identify critical success factors (CSF) that have influence on SPI. The study results were confirmed by the literature review. The CSF were identified through a combination of qualitative and quantitative analyses of the results of a survey we conducted with SPI practitioners involved in Brazilian software industry experiences. We also identified the relationships of major factors that emerged from the survey. We expect that the major CSF presented in this paper can be used by SPI managers in the definition of SPI strategies aiming to enhance SPI initiatives success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Companies spend significant efforts on testing their products to achieve a sufficient quality level. This paper presents results from evaluating the quality impact of implementing a framework for component-level test automation and Test-Driven Development. The evaluation comprised six projects for two products at a software development department at Ericsson. The paper suggests how an existing measurement approach can be used for evaluating the quality impact of improvements in early phases, i.e. by classifying faults reported on released products after which phase they should have been caught in. Based on this measurement approach, the evaluation determined that the ratio of reported faults in the released products decreased significantly after implementing the framework. That is, the ratio of faults belonging to component-level testing decreased from between 60-70 percent to less than 20 percent in the two studied products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software complexity measures are essential aspects of software engineering. Relatively few studies have been conducted to compare the performance of different complexity metrics. This paper describes an experimental investigation, which compares the performance of three different software complexity metrics; McCabe's cyclomatic complexity, Halstead's complexity measures and Douce's spatial complexity, by using data from an Open Source project Eclipse JDT. The results of this investigation indicate that in different situation these complexity metrics show different performance. However, Halstead's effort measure and Douce's spatial complexity are highly correlated, showing bigger correlation coefficient values. This leads us to suggest that because Halstead's complexity measure is more mature and has better supporting tools, it may be a good idea to replace Douce's spatial complexity metric with Halstead's effort measure in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lack of conceptualization and inclusion of human, social, and organizational dynamics in software process simulation models is a critical obstacle in (1) exploring the impact of socio-technical dimensions in software development and (2) measuring the performance of software processes. This paper presents a conceptual multi-resolution modeling and simulation framework that delineates various dimensions of organizational behavior as they relate to software development. The framework conceptualizes software development as a transformation system from the perspective of knowledge acquisition and cognitive systems engineering. Explicit distinctions between the strategy, operational, and technical views are clearly presented. Specifically, the paper formulates a preliminary conceptual model and elaborates on design space of the operational and technical views that focus on organizational, social, and human dynamics in process performance modeling and simulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central issue in knowledge management and software process improvement is to learn from experience. In software engineering, most experience is gathered in projects, which makes project experience a prime source for learning. Many companies conduct postmortem reviews, but we have found few companies that analyze the outcome of several reviews to facilitate learning on an organizational level. This paper reports an explorative study of what we can learn from analyzing postmortem review reports of twelve projects in a medium-size software company. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All systems during their lifecycle, no matter how simple, will generate legal implications that need to be managed. The potential cost of an inadequate management of legal aspects can even imply the failure of the project. As a consequence, legal risk management should not only be a major activity of the development lifecycle, but it needs to be performed by qualified personnel following well-defined procedures and standards. However, current software process improvement models do not properly include processes for legal audits and more concretely legal risks management for each phase of the software development lifecycle. Neither in industry related to manage legal risks of software projects is possible to find well-defined and standardised projects. This lack of standardised process means that legal risks are handled reactively instead of proactively. This work presents a process for managing legal risks. It is organised by a series of activities to be performed at each stage of the software development lifecycle to eliminate or minimize the risk of project failures for legal reasons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software Process Improvement Programs provide many benefits to the companies investing in this type of activities.One of the main problems in relation with SPI Value Management consists of the difficulty to convince senior management to invest in this type of programs. This issue is solved by means of benchmarking with successful histories by means of case studies. The information of current of SPI case studies is very heterogeneous, making this task so difficult. This paper presents a technique to formalize the information enclosed in an SPI case study providing an easy access to the relevant information of a SPI case study. Moreover, the results, obtained from its application with pre-existing case studies are provided. This work has been partially supported by the Spanish National Project "Software Process Management Platform: modeling, reuse and measurement" (TIN2004-07083). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web application development is under certain circumstances such as a strong emphasis on time-to-market characterised by the usage of informal and ad-hoc development practices and a lot of tacit knowledge. Here we present an experiment that has been carried out in order to evaluate a recently proposed release planning method for web application development. This method aims at bringing stakeholders together to share knowledge and to decide on a configuration for the next release that satisfies all stakeholders. The method has been evaluated in terms of its effect on factors such as knowledge sharing, understanding, support to reach a consensus and stakeholders satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software process improvement (SPI) models can be difficult to understand, principally because they lack visual representations relating concepts to text. Some models do not provide guidelines to help us understand their properties: i.e., their modular structure, the control-regulation configuration of common features in a key process area, and the arrangement of key process areas at each level. We propose Systems Modular Analysis (SMA) as a graphical modelling approach to facilitate understanding of SPI models. Using SMA, we reveal the internal structure of a key process area (KPA) in CMM-SW as a non-redundant configuration of common features. When the Level 2 KPAs of CMM-SW are modelled using SMA, a normative structure which shows a modular and recursive arrangement of process areas is obtained. We conduct an experiment to show how SMA helps in understanding CMM-SW. We conclude that SMA significantly improves understanding of the properties and structure of CMM-SW Level 2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizing improvement work is a decision that is often made in vain. There is no standardized way to do things that works for every improvement effort. A more contingent approach is needed. Experience from seven years of improvement work at SimCorp shows that different types of improvement work requires different ways of organizing. We identify five ways of organizing for five types of improvement work. We use 9 case studies from SimCorp to show how they fit together. The resulting framework can be used to find a suitable way of organizing for a given type of improvement work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In small growing software companies, it is important to pay attention to software process improvement (SPI) in order to be successful and competitive in both domestic and foreign markets. However, limited resources and lack of knowledge about process culture may hinder the improvement efforts in small companies. In this paper, we present development activities done in a small growing software company in order to establish basis for SPI. Familiarizing to processes and SPI is done by modeling company's processes using a lightweight software process modeling technique. The modeling combined with external consulting provides the company with capability to visualize their processes and to identify the problems in the processes. The improvement activities have been triggered by pointing out the problems. In the presented case, the company has independently implemented quite significant improvements for identified problems by acquiring needed knowledge and by implementing new tools to support workflows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]