Characterizing and Assessing a Large-Scale Software Maintenance Organization

One important component of a software process is the organizational context in which the process is enacted. This component is often missing or incomplete in current process modeling approaches. One technique for modeling this perspective is the Actor-Dependency (AD) Model. This paper reports on a case study which used this approach to analyze and assess a large software maintenance organization. Our goal was to identify the approach's strengths and weaknesses while providing practical recommendations for improvement. The AD model was found to be very useful in capturing the important properties of the organizational context of the maintenance process, and aided in the understanding of the flaws found in this process. However, a number of opportunities for extending and improving the AD model were identified. Among others, there is a need to incorporate quantitative information to complement the qualitative model. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-94-112

Using the OPT Improvement Approach in the SQL/DS Development Environment

This paper 1 presents the results of an exploratory case study in which the OPT method was applied to a real software development environment. The OPT method is an iterative software development improvement process. It is specifically aimed at organizational structures and development processes. The steps include modeling the relationship between the organization and the process, measuring various properties of this relationship, and choosing organizational and process changes that will satisfy a set of goals and constraints. Applying OPT to the IBM Software Solutions Toronto Laboratory SQL/DS 2 project demonstrated that this method helps to clarify issues that arise in the design of software development organizations and processes. Specifically, OPT made it possible to refine general improvement goals and to identify specific changes to be made to the environment to fulfill these goals. This paper summarizes the OPT approach and presents results from the SQL/DS case study. 1 The ..