Organizational Change Perspectives on Software Process Improvement

Many software organizations have engaged in Software Process Improvement (SPI) and experienced the challenges related to managing such complex organizational change efforts. As a result, there is an increasing body of research investigating change management in SPI. To provide an overview of what we know and don’t know about SPI as organizational change, this paper addresses the following question: What are the dominant perspectives on SPI as organizational change in the literature and how is this knowledge presented and published? All journals on the AIS ranking list were screened to identify relevant articles and Gareth Morgan’s organizational metaphors (1996) were used to analyze this literature considering the following dimensions of each article: organizational perspective (metaphor), knowledge orientation (normative versus descriptive), theoretical emphasis (high versus low), main audience (practitioner versus academic), geographical origin (Scandinavia, the Americas, Europe, or the Asia-Pacific), and publication level (high versus low ranked journal). The review demonstrates that the literature on SPI as organizational change is firmly grounded in both theory and practice, and Scandinavia and the Americas are the main contributors to this research. The distribution of articles across Morgan’s metaphors is uneven and reveals knowledge gaps that present new avenues for research. The current literature offers important insights into organizational change in SPI from machine, organism, and brain perspectives. Practitioners may use these articles as a guide to SPI insights relevant to their improvement initiatives. In contrast, the impact of culture, dominance, psychic prison, flux and transformation, and politics in SPI have only received scant attention. We argue that these perspectives offer important insights into the challenges involved in managing change in SPI. Researchers are therefore advised to engage in new SPI research based on one or more of these perspectives. Overall, the paper provides a roadmap to help identify insights and specific articles related to SPI as organizational change.Software Process Improvement; Organizational Change; Organizational Metaphors; Images of Organization; Literature Review

Conceptualization and Measurement of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM): An Examination of Past Practices and Suggestions for Future Applications

The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) has obtained world-wide status as a premier process improvement framework. This influence has not gone unnoticed by the academic community who has utilized the CMM as a key construct representing a firm’s IT project management and development capabilities. However, an examination of the current state of research reveals no consensus on how to best operationalize CMM-based process capability; therefore, this study seeks to start a dialog in the academic community about how CMM-based process capability should be conceptualized and measured. While the results do suggest that CMM-based process capability is multidimensional, and that a process structure rather than a level structure may be the most appropriate; the main intent of this research is to call attention to the need for greater rigor in the measurement and conceptualization of CMM-based process capability in the academic literature. The hope is this research represents a first step in developing a fully refined and validated CMM-based process capability measure

Learning to Improve Software Processes: Making Sense of Practice

Software Process Improvement (SPI) programs are frequently considered to be planned in nature. However, there is recent evidence to suggest that SPI can be understood as a form of learning. Drawing on the organizational learning literature, this paper proposes an active learning perspective of improvements in processes. This view recognizes the various actors in the project to be reflective in their actions, making sense of the current context and thus designing their use of the process to best suit their needs at the time. The changes in the processes emerge through ongoing adjustments, experimentation and improvisation as developers and managers seek to improve their product development

Challenging Software Process Improvement by Design

Software process improvement (SPI) today is based mainly on a perception of software processes as artifacts and this perception has led SPI efforts to focus on perfecting such artifacts as a means to improve the practices of the people supposed to execute these software processes. Such SPI efforts thus tend to view the design of software processes as separate from their use. In this approach process designers are expected to provide process knowledge to software developers, and software developers are expected to provide experiences and problems to the process designers. This focus on software processes as artifacts implies an emphasis on formalization and externalization of process models possibly at the expense of the process knowledge in the heads of the process users. The paper point to problems related to separation and externalization from a theoretical standpoint and suggests an alternative to Improvement by Design: End-user SPI, where process users individually and collectively design their own software processes assisted by process experts

IT-enabled Process Innovation: A Literature Review

The importance of Information Technology (IT) is growing, and in a hypercompetitive market IT must be used as a strategic asset for companies to succeed. In order to gain strategic benefits from IT, companies need to be innovative when deploying IT. This can be achieved by reengineering business processes to take advantage of the possibilities IT provides. In 1993 Thomas H. Davenport presented a framework describing the role of IT in process innovation . Based on this framework, the purpose of this paper is to conduct a literature review to answer the following research question: What kind of opportunities does IT provide for process innovation? . Davenport\u27s framework is used as an analytical lens to review articles from the top 20 IS and management journals. The paper provides an overview and an in-depth analysis of the literature on IT-enabled process innovation and suggests avenues for future research as well as recommendations for practitioners. Our analyses reveal five distinct themes related to opportunities for IT-enabled process innovation, all of which offer guidance to practitioners and highlight gaps in our current knowledge about how to leverage IT for innovation purposes

Learning to improve software processes.

Software Process Improvement (SPI) programs are frequently considered to be planned in nature. However, there is recent evidence to suggest that SPI can be understood as a form of learning. Drawing on the organizational learning literature this paper proposes an active learning perspective of improvements in processes. This view recognizes the various actors in the project to be reflective in their actions, making sense of the current context and thus designing their use of the process to best suit their needs at the time. The changes in the processes emerge through ongoing adjustments, experimentation and improvisation as developers and managers seek to improve their product development

Improving project management planning and control in service operations environment.

Projects have evidently become the core activity in most companies and organisations where they are investing significant amount of resources in different types of projects as building new services, process improvement, etc. This research has focused on service sector in attempt to improve project management planning and control activities. The research is concerned with improving the planning and control of software development projects. Existing software development models are analysed and their best practices identified and these have been used to build the proposed model in this research. The research extended the existing planning and control approaches by considering uncertainty in customer requirements, resource flexibility and risks level variability. In considering these issues, the research has adopted lean principles for planning and control software development projects. A novel approach introduced within this research through the integration of simulation modelling techniques with Taguchi analysis to investigate ‗what if‘ project scenarios. Such scenarios reflect the different combinations of the factors affecting project completion time and deliverables. In addition, the research has adopted the concept of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) to develop an automated Operations Project Management Deployment (OPMD) model. The model acts as an iterative manner uses ‗what if‘ scenario performance outputs to identify constraints that may affect the completion of a certain task or phase. Any changes made during the project phases will then automatically update the performance metrics for each software development phases. In addition, optimisation routines have been developed that can be used to provide management response and to react to the different levels of uncertainty. Therefore, this research has looked at providing a comprehensive and visual overview of important project tasks i.e. progress, scheduled work, different resources, deliverables and completion that will make it easier for project members to communicate with each other to reach consensus on goals, status and required changes. Risk is important aspect that has been included in the model as well to avoid failure. The research emphasised on customer involvement, top management involvement as well as team members to be among the operational factors that escalate variability levels 3 and effect project completion time and deliverables. Therefore, commitment from everyone can improve chances of success. Although the role of different project management techniques to implement projects successfully has been widely established in areas such as the planning and control of time, cost and quality; still, the distinction between the project and project management is less than precise and a little was done in investigating different levels of uncertainty and risk levels that may occur during different project phase.United Arab Emirates Governmen

Reporting framework-based software process improvement : A quantitative and qualitative review of 71 experience reports of CMM-based SPI

Software development projects have a notoriously high failure rate. Software process improvement (SPI) frameworks have since the early 1990-ies been a suggested remedy for this. The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) is such a framework, but the actual process of implementing the CMM has proven difficult for many software organizations. Another problem is that documentation of the actual benefits of CMM-based SPI (CBS) is vague. In a pursuit of rectifying the situation we present a quantitative and qualitative review of 71 published case stories of CBS. With the data collected we set out to examine several issues: first, the potential for software organizations for learning from and reproducing the almost non-exclusively positive results of CBS reported in case stories, second, to what degree the calculations of Return On Investment (ROI) present believable numbers, and last, if CBS is something that is beneficial for the software industry as a whole. We found that, first, because case stories are largely reported by companies that are unrepresentative for the industry as a whole, the average company will have problems learning from and reproducing the results reported. Secondly, we found that calculations of ROI in general in the literature are of doubtful quality, but with a few prominent and notable exceptions which indicate that viable calculations of ROI for CBS are possible. Finally, we present a reasoning that indicates that CBS probably is beneficial for the software industry as a whole. Drawing on a tradition in the SPI literature of collecting "success factors" for CBS in assisting implementation, we also present a list of all explicitly reported "success" and "non-success"-factors found in the case stories

Investigating software process in practice: a grounded theory perspective

This thesis is concerned with how software process and software process improvement is practiced within the indigenous Irish software product industry. Using the grounded theory methodology, the study utilises in-depth interviews to examine the attitude and perceptions of practitioners towards software process and software process improvement. The outcome of the work is a theory, grounded in the field data, that explains how software processes are formed and evolve, and when and why software process improvement is undertaken. The resultant grounded theory is based on two conceptual themes, Process Formation and Process Evolution, and one core theoretical category, Cost of Process. The empirical investigation shows that software process improvement programmes are implemented by companies as a reaction to business events, and how many software managers reject software process improvement because o f the associated costs. In addition, indigenous Irish software companies largely ignore commercial best practice software process improvement models, and the reasons for this are discussed. The research also argues that software process improvement is not solely technologycentred but is also affected by wider human and organisational factors. As these ‘sociocultural’ influences have been more widely addressed in the Information Systems discipline, than in Software Engineering, this work draws on the experiences and lessons from both disciplines and ultimately resides between these two academic fields. The results o f this work provide new light on the issues facing software process and process improvement in small software product companies and make a contribution towards bridging the gaps between research and practice, and theory and practice, in both Software Engineering and Information Systems