Understanding the perception of very small software companies towards the adoption of process standards

This paper is concerned with understanding the issues that affect the adoption of software process standards by Very Small Entities (VSEs), their needs from process standards and their willingness to engage with the new ISO/IEC 29110 standard in particular. In order to achieve this goal, a series of industry data collection studies were undertaken with a collection of VSEs. A twin track approach of a qualitative data collection (interviews and focus groups) and quantitative data collection (questionnaire) were undertaken. Data analysis was being completed separately and the final results were merged, using the coding mechanisms of grounded theory. This paper serves as a roadmap for both researchers wishing to understand the issues of process standards adoption by very small companies and also for the software process standards community

Business success in software SMEs: recommendations for future SPI studies

There is presently insufficient data regarding the relationship between software process improvement (SPI) and business success, a fact which may reduce process prioritisation in software development in practice. To assist future studies examining the relationship between SPI and business success, we developed a new two-phased approach to examining business. The first phase involves the elicitation of business objectives for the forthcoming year, with the second phase determining the extent of achievement of the recorded objectives. At EuroSPI 2011, we described the two-phased approach in detail and reported on the findings from deploying the first phase of the examination to software developing small- and medium-sized enterprises (software SMEs). In this follow-up paper, we report on the findings from the second phase of the investigation in the participating software SMEs, formulating an additional important new recommendation for future studies