An Evaluation of CMMI Process Areas for Small to Medium Sized Software Development Organisations

In this paper we describe the results of CMMI software process appraisal work with six small-to-medium sized software development companies. Our analysis of six CMMI Process Areas appraised within each of these organisations is presented. Commonly practiced or not practiced elements of the model are identified, leading to the notion of perceived value associated with each specific CMMI practice. A finer grained framework which encompasses the notion of perceived value within specific practices is presented. We argue that such a framework provides incentive to small-to-medium sized enterprises starting process improvement programmes

Improving the Express Process Appraisal Method

In this paper we firstly describe the appraisal method that was developed by the Centre for Software Process Technologies (CSPT) to assess software processes within small to medium sized (SMEs) organisations that have little or no experience of software process improvement programmes. We then discuss our experience of developing and using our appraisal method within six SMEs organisations within Northern Ireland. Next we compare our assessment method with existing lightweight assessment methods that have also been used to assess software processes within SMEs software development organisations. We then describe new features that we are currently introducing to improve our software process appraisal method

The Express Process Appraisal Method

In this paper we describe the appraisal method that was developed by the Centre for Software Process Technologies (CSPT) to assess software processes within small to medium sized organisations that have little or no experience of software process improvement programmes. The method, called Express Process Appraisal (EPA), is a class-C compliant CMMI® [1] method for the assessment of software processes. It has been applied in 6 commercial organisations to date. The experiences of these appraisals are discussed

A Proposed Way for European Software Industries to Achieve Growth Within the Global Marketplace

Global market expansion forces the competition in the field of software development to grow extremely fast. Accordingly, countries that base their brand in the field of information technologies are looking forward to quality and productivity improvement along with price reduction. One of the major trends in the global market is outsourcing, which is considered to be an opportunity to achieve best knowledge, extra resources and assurance of quality development, speed time to market, and cut costs. The role of emerging nations in this context increases every day, pushing out the old players. This article will therefore suggest how software development should change within the Northern Ireland (NI) software industry and adopt a global software development model in order to continue as a major player within the global software development industry

Northern Ireland Software Industry Survey

This presentation discusses statistical findings obtained from a survey of the state of software development practices within Northern Ireland (NI). The survey was developed and conducted by staff from the Centre for Software Process Technologies (CSPT). The CSPT is concerned with the engineering of high quality software. An important function of the CSPT is to provide infrastructural support to the NI software industry. CSPT was established in September 2002 and is jointly funded by Invest Northern Ireland (INI) – a regional economic development agency, and the University of Ulster. A significant part of the centre’s remit is concerned with empirical research in the area of software processes and with knowledge transfer objectives in relation to software process improvement. In order that the CSPT can play an active role in helping software organizations to improve their development processes, the centre needed to understand the current state of software development practice within NI

Risk Management process improvement for the Medical Device Industry

This paper outlines a software process improvement (SPI) framework to ensure regulatory compliance for the software developed in medical devices. The software framework introduced here (known as MedeSPI – Medical Devices Software Process Improvement) will address an opportunity to integrate the regulatory issues and process improvement mechanisms in order to achieve improved software processes within a number of process areas that are critical to the development of software for medical devices [3]. The paper then describes in detail how the goals, practices and capability levels for the risk management process area within the MedeSPI framework have been developed. Software is becoming an increasingly important aspect of medical devices and medical device regulation. Medical devices can only be marketed if compliance and approval from the appropriate regulatory bodies of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) [4] (US requirement), and the European Commission under its Medical Device Directives (MDD) [2] (CE marking requirement) is achieved. Integrated into the design process of medical devices, is the requirement of the production and maintenance of a device technical file, incorporating a design history file. Design history illustrates the well documented, defined and controlled processes and outputs, undertaken in the development of medical devices and for our particular consideration with this framework - the software components

How European Software Industries can prepare for growth within the Global Marketplace - Northern Irish Strategies

Global market expansion forces the competition in the field of software development to grow extremely fast. Accordingly, countries that base their brand in the field of information technologies are looking forward to quality and productivity improvement along with price reduction. One of the major trends in the global market is outsourcing, which is considered to be an opportunity to achieve best knowledge, extra resources and assurance of quality development, speed time-to-market, and cut costs. The role of emerging nations in this context increases every day, pushing out the old players. This paper will therefore suggest how software development should change within the Northern Ireland (NI) software industry and adopt a global software development model in order to continue as a major player within the global software development industry