The purpose of this State-of-the-Art Report is to provide more insight into the details necessary to demonstrate from a business, profit and loss, and senior management perspective the benefits of improved software management using software process improvement techniques. Although the report is primarily focused on the software process and software cost benefits that can be achieved through the implementation of a software process improvement (SPI) program, the report examines some of the more secondary software process improvement benefits as well. Ultimately, the purpose of the article is to enable software professionals to compare and analyze software process improvement (SPI) methods for the purposes of presentation to senior management. The paper concludes with an extensively annotated software process improvement bibliography. (44 pages)
LOGOS performed research, under U.S. Air Force sponsorship, to provide U.S. industry with data on the positive, quantifiable benefits, or ROI, for software process improvement programs based on the Software Engineering Institute's (SEI) Capability Maturity Model for software (CMM). This article by Judith G. Brodman and Donna L. Johnson of LOGOS International describes their SPI (software process improvement) research results, which include a profile of software metric usage according to software maturity level (Levels 1 through 5), the organizational factors that contribute to higher and lower software process maturity, trends in the length of time spent by U.S. industry at each software maturity level, and a summary of the software process improvement ROI data that U.S. industry has amassed so far. (13 pages)
Software Process Improvement: Practical Guidelines for Business Success
by Sami Zahran
From the Back Cover: "This book will help you to manage and control the quality of your organization's software products. Continually dealing with the problems caused by software defects can be both time-consuming and demanding. Sami Zahrani's pragmatic approach will take you from reactive fire-fighting to a preventative culture of disciplined and continuous process improvement."
This book will help you: (1) establish a process-focused software development organization; (2) design and implement procedures for developing quality software in time and within budget; (3) benchmark your organization against the industry standards for the software process, including the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), ISO 9001, the new standard ISO/IEC 15504 (originally known as SPICE) and Bootstrap.
About the Author: Dr. Sami Zahran is one of the chief advocates of software process improvement and its impact on organizations. He has over three decades of experience in the software industry assuming senior positions with large organizations including ICL, the United Nations, DEC and currently with IBM. He was trained in Software Process Improvement at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr Zahran regularly teaches courses on the subject and is an invited speaker at numerous international conferences and workshops.
For more information on software best practices and IT management, please contact Michael Milutis, the IT Metrics and Productivity Journal Executive Director, at michael_milutis@compaid.com
