Categorising Software Contexts: Research-in-Progress
This work aims to help researchers and practitioners tailor software processes more effectively, but it is incremental as it builds on existing ad-hoc studies.
The paper addresses the lack of a systematic basis for comparing software process studies by proposing a model to categorize software contexts, tested through analysis of six documents.
A growing number of researchers suggest that software process must be tailored to a project's context to achieve maximal performance. Researchers have studied 'context' in an ad-hoc way, with focus on those contextual factors that appear to be of significance. The result is that we have no useful basis upon which to contrast and compare studies. We are currently researching a theoretical basis for software context for the purpose of tailoring and note that a deeper consideration of the meaning of the term 'context' is required before we can proceed. In this paper, we examine the term and present a model based on insights gained from our initial categorisation of contextual factors from the literature. We test our understanding by analysing a further six documents. Our contribution thus far is a model that we believe will support a theoretical operationalisation of software context for the purpose of process tailoring.