Software Process Improvement: Results and Experience from the Field

For over a decade, software process improvement (SPI) has been promoted as an approach to improve systematically the way software is developed and managed. Mostly this research and the relevant experience reports have been focussed on large software companies.

Conradi and his co-authors have collected the main results from four Norwegian industrial research and development projects on SPI carried out between 1996 and 2005, which, in contrast to other treatments, concentrated on small- and medium-sized companies, typically characterized by fast-changing environments and processes. The presentation is organized in five sections: general principles and methods of SPI, knowledge management for SPI, process modelling and electronic process guides, estimation methods, and object-oriented and component-based systems. A spectrum of empirical methods has been used, e.g. case studies, large-scale experiments, surveys and interviews, and action research.

The book mainly targets researchers and graduate students in (empirical) software engineering, and software professionals working in development or quality assurance.

Reidar Conradi received his Ph.D. in computer science from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in 1976. From 1972 to 1975 he worked at SINTEF as a researcher. Since 1975 he has been assistant professor at NTNU and a full professor since 1985. He has participated in many national and EU projects and chaired several workshops. His research interests are in software engineering, object-oriented methods and software reuse, distributed systems, software evolution and configuration management, software quality and software process improvement.

Tore Dybå is the chief scientist at SINTEF Information and Communication Technology and a visiting scientist at the Simula Research Laboratory. His research interests include empirical software engineering, software process improvement, and organizational learning. He received his Dr. Ing. in computer and information science from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He’s a member of the International Software Engineering Research Network and the IEEE Computer Society.

Dag Sjøberg received the MSc degree in computer science from the University of Oslo in 1987 and the PhD degree in computing science from the University of Glasgow in 1993. He has five years of industry experience as a consultant and group leader. He is now research director of the Department of Software Engineering, Simula Research Laboratory, and a professor of software engineering in the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo. Among his research interests are research methods in empirical software engineering, software process improvement, software effort estimation, and object-oriented analysis and design.

Tor Ulsund is quality manager at Geomatikk AS, a company providing systems for asset management. He has been working as systems developer, quality manager and project manager from 1980. From 1997 he has been project manager for the three large Norwegian processimprovement projects SPIQ, PROFIT and SPIKE.