From Pragmatic to Systematic Software Process Improvement: An Evaluated Approach
This addresses the problem of managing complex SPI projects for organizations, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing SPI approaches.
The paper tackles the challenge of software process improvement (SPI) by introducing ArSPI, an artefact-based approach that addresses the needs of both process engineers and project managers, with validation showing it to be a helpful instrument for setting up and steering SPI projects.
Software processes improvement (SPI) is a challenging task, as many different stakeholders, project settings, and contexts and goals need to be considered. SPI projects are often operated in a complex and volatile environment and, thus, require a sound management that is resource-intensive requiring many stakeholders to contribute to the process assessment, analysis, design, realisation, and deployment. Although there exist many valuable SPI approaches, none address the needs of both process engineers and project managers. This article presents an Artefact-based Software Process Improvement & Management approach (ArSPI) that closes this gap. ArSPI was developed and tested across several SPI projects in large organisations in Germany and Eastern Europe. The approach further encompasses a template for initiating, performing, and managing SPI projects by defining a set of 5 key artefacts and 24 support artefacts. We present ArSPI and discus results of its validation indicating ArSPI to be a helpful instrument to set up and steer SPI projects.