Process Improvement in Large-Scale Industrial Environments Based on SCM

Process improvement in a large-scale industrial environment is a challenge for numerous reasons. Besides others it is di#cult to convince and motivate a critical mass of the sta# and it is particularly expensive to train a large number of developers and managers. Established Software Configuration Management (SCM) practices pave the way to improve in a more efficient "bottom-up fashion" by processes based on SCM concepts. This paper describes the reasoning that justifies bottom-up process improvement based on SCM and presents our practical experiences with SCM-based process improvement in a large scale industrial environment.