Using grounded theory to understand software process improvement: A study of Irish software product companies

Software Process Improvement (SPI) aims to understand the software process as it is used within an organisation and thus drive the implementation of changes to that process to achieve specific goals such as increasing development speed, achieving higher product quality or reducing costs. Accordingly, SPI researchers must be equipped with the methodologies and tools to enable them to look within organisations and understand the state of practice with respect to software process and process improvement initiatives, in addition to investigating the relevant literature. Having examined a number of potentially suitable research methodologies, we have chosen Grounded Theory as a suitable approach to determine what was happening in actual practice in relation to software process and SPI, using the indigenous Irish software product industry as a test-bed. The outcome of this study is a theory, grounded in the field data, that explains when and why SPI is undertaken by the software industry. The objective of this paper is to describe both the selection and usage of grounded theory in this study and evaluate its effectiveness as a research methodology for software process researchers. Accordingly, this paper will focus on the selection and usage of grounded theory, rather than results of the SPI study itself

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