Toward computational support for software process improvement activities

Abstract

Software organizations and projects need guidance on how to improve software process, not just guidelines on what to improve. Several surveys demonstrate that the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) and ISO-9000 only provide the latter. We report our in-depth analysis on a seventeen-month effort in software process improvement (SPI) at OMRON Corporation. The goal of the analysis was to identify issues and challenges of SPI and to design a step-wise practical method to avoid such problems. Major problems we have found include the lack of shared goal among stakeholders, insufficient understanding of the current progress of SPI efforts, and underutilization of a large amount of complex information generated during SPI. We present the method for software organizations and projects for dealing with the problems, and argue for a knowledge-based SPI support system based on the method.