Software Management: Software Process Improvement Assessment Answer

Discuss about the Software Management for Software Process Improvement.

Introduction

The report depicts the importance of software process improvement in software industries. In order to get maximum benefit from the competitive marketplace identification of barriers are very important (Unterkalmsteiner et al. 2012). Once barriers will be recognized removal of global challenges will become easier. Implementation of least number of formal SPI methodologies, lack of employee motivation, job pressure and availability of less resource are the reason for barriers creation. Quality of the products is one of the most important emergent properties required to develop a life cycle project for software development (Fenton and Bieman 2014).

The Summary of the Arti

cle

SPI is referred to as an assessment and development of different software processes and practices. The goal of SPI is to develop the process of software development including its establishment, capacity improvement and critical process. Some factors such as cost, feasibility, time management, resource and maintenance are analyzed for SPI process (Turk, France and Rumpe 2014). The major objective is to provide an error free application with affordable price to the consumers.

Literature Review

The process of software development has become one of the major concerns among the software industries. This process is generally used by the organizations for software implementation and maintenance (Khan and Keung 2016). In order to enhance global advantages and competitiveness, SPI best policies and practices are adopted by software enterprises. Technology is a gift but on the other hand after adopting these, organizations are facing severe external attacks. Due to the distributive nature of SPI, different challenges that the organizations are facing is illustrated in this report. Additionally, nine success factors of SPI and six major barriers are also indicated in this article. Based on the advantages and disadvantages the factors are ranked. Moreover, the barriers that must be removed to achieve the goal of the organizations are mentioned in this report elaborately.

According to Khan and Keung (2016) in order to optimize different software processes SPI based standards and models are developed. CMMI is one of the efficient models among them. Kreiner et al. (2016) stated that, to accomplish qualitative and quantitative software standard of CMMI and ISO are generated. Again Turk, France and Rumpe (2014) opined that, the success factors are extracted to determine the barriers of SPI and remove it from the core model. Different authors provided different view as; Clarke et al. (2016) said that, for ISIT projects, SPI provides thoughts of success criteria. Thus, it can be said that, review on IT architecture is the best process to find and ensure the effective design quality for software development.

Methodologies

Systematic literature review is adopted to determine and classify the success factors and barriers. It helps to develop the distributive management activity of a software system. Again, the same method can be applied to classify the issue formed within distributive teams. The questionnaires relevant to research areas can be examined and classified by SLR method (Unterkalmsteiner et al. 2012). Different methods adopted by the authors in this article are research problems, questionnaires, data collection and synthesis of those data. Other models are process maturity model development, Software process access and software capability evaluation.

Figure 1: software process maturity

(Source: Harter, Kemerer and Slaughter 2012, pp-812)

Discussion on the Result

From the research result it can be concluded that, dependent variable and independent variables both metrics are measured for calculating the result (Turk, France and Rumpe 2014). The factors that come under consideration are involvement of staffs, management commitment, training and development of the team, information delivery, SPI awareness etc for data extraction. The resultants have identified the barriers and tried to resolve it.

Figure 2: Process flow

(Source: Unterkalmsteiner et al. 2012, pp-400)

Conclusion

From the overall discussion it can be concluded that, barriers and success criteria can also be compared mathematically to define the progress of the processes and priorities. From findings and analysis  it is clear that, proper implementation and usage of SPI can lead one organization in the way to global competitive success.

Lessons Learned

Definition of SPI

SPI is referred to as a strategy which implies the effectiveness of software processes and also ensure the software development (Clarke et al. 2016). A meaningful or efficient strategy that is more focused, flexible and reliable can be developed by SPI to improve software products.

Processes of SPI

There are three processes involved in the system such as resource, activity and products and again activities are subdivided in planning, analysis, design, testing, training and implementation and products of SPI are subdivided into hardware, software and documentation.

Importance of Consideration

The factors are considered as software process is strictly connected to assessment, and capability determination (Kreiner et al. 2016). The improvement strategy identifies and makes suggestive changes required in software processes. Software process is examined by the assessment. Strength, weakness and maturity of software model can also be measured with the help of these factors. Thus, these factors are selected.

References

Clarke, P.M., O'Connor, R.V., Rout, T. and Dorling, A. eds., 2016. Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination: 16th International Conference, SPICE 2016, Dublin, Ireland, June 9-10, 2016, Proceedings(Vol. 609). Springer.

Fenton, N. and Bieman, J., 2014. Software metrics: a rigorous and practical approach. CRC Press.

Harter, D.E., Kemerer, C.F. and Slaughter, S.A., 2012. Does software process improvement reduce the severity of defects? A longitudinal field study. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 38(4), pp.810-827.

Khan, A.A. and Keung, J., 2016. Systematic Review of success factors and barriers for Software Process Improvement in Global Software Development. IET Software.

Kreiner, C., O'Connor, R.V., Poth, A. and Messnarz, R. eds., 2016.Systems, Software and Services Process Improvement: 23rd European Conference, EuroSPI 2016, Graz, Austria, September 14-16, 2016, Proceedings (Vol. 633). Springer.

Turk, D., France, R. and Rumpe, B., 2014. Assumptions underlying agile software development processes. arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.6610.

Unterkalmsteiner, M., Gorschek, T., Islam, A.M., Cheng, C.K., Permadi, R.B. and Feldt, R., 2012. Evaluation and measurement of software process improvement—a systematic literature review. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 38(2), pp.398-424.