Software process improvement in a medium-sized company

Abstract

For many organisations, software is a crucial component of their business as it provides a competitive advantage over other organisations. Hence, they are very keen to ensure that the software they employ is not only reliable and defect-free, but also cost-effective to produce and maintain. That is, organisations desire the highest quality of software, but at a minimum cost and time. Research into software engineering has shown that by improving software development or maintenance processes, there can be an improvement to the software quality. This thesis describes how software process improvement has been implemented in a medium-sized company where software is used to automate manufacturing processes. Prior to this study, there had not been any form of software process improvement in the company, although they followed company standards and procedures that have been in place for over a decade. The aim of this study is to use software development and maintenance projects in the company as cases for process improvement initiatives. Each case provides evidence in support of a hypothesis that is associated with it. For each case study, the problem is assessed, a diagnosis has been researched and actions have been taken based on that research. Each hypothesis is evaluated at the end of the thesis followed by conclusions of the whole research. The principle outcome of this research is that software practices of a medium-sized company can be improved using small-scale software process improvement. Using the CMM as a guide, software process initiatives were implemented to address specific areas of software engineering, i.e. maintenance, testing, planning and control, requirements management, and testing. Efforts have been made to raise the company's maturity in the CMM with respect to these areas. Collectively, the case studies achieve improvement of software practices by way of applying software process improvement in a systematic manner - in this case the IDEAL framework from the CMM.