Investigating the relationship between software process improvement, situational change, and business success in software SMEs

While we have learned a great deal from Software Process Improvement (SPI) research to date, no earlier study has been designed from the outset to examine the relationship between SPI and business success in software development small- to- medium- sized companies (software SMEs). Since business processes are generally acknowledged as having an important role to play in supporting business success, it follows that the software development process (a large and complex component of the overall business process) has an important contribution to make in supporting business success in software development companies. However, to date we have very little evidence regarding the role of SPI in supporting business success, especially for software SMEs. The need for SPI is dependent on the extent of situational change in a software development setting, and therefore any examination of the relationship between SPI and business success would be deficient if it did not also examine the extent of situational change. Therefore, this thesis describes a novel approach to examining SPI, situational change and business success in software development companies. Furthermore, having discharged this new approach to 15 software SMEs, this thesis makes the important new discovery that the amount of SPI implemented in a software SME is positively associated with the extent of business success – especially when the degree of situational change is taken into account. This thesis describes the first published study to examine the relationship between SPI, situational change and business success in software SMEs. The findings suggest that there are business benefits to implementing SPI in software SMEs, with the degree of situational change being an important factor informing SPI initiatives. Furthermore, this research has yielded valuable new insights into the nature of SPI, situational change and business success in software SMEs

An evaluation of the challenges of Multilingualism in Data Warehouse development

In this paper we discuss Business Intelligence and define what is meant by support for Multilingualism in a Business Intelligence reporting context. We identify support for Multilingualism as a challenging issue which has implications for data warehouse design and reporting performance. Data warehouses are a core component of most Business Intelligence systems and the star schema is the approach most widely used to develop data warehouses and dimensional Data Marts. We discuss the way in which Multilingualism can be supported in the Star Schema and identify that current approaches have serious limitations which include data redundancy and data manipulation, performance and maintenance issues. We propose a new approach to enable the optimal application of multilingualism in Business Intelligence. The proposed approach was found to produce satisfactory results when used in a proof-of-concept environment. Future work will include testing the approach in an enterprise environmen