Software Practice Improvement

Abstract

Software Process Improvement (SPI) is a systematic approach used to improve the capabilities of software organisations. One basic idea in SPI is to assess the organisations’ current practice and improve their software processes on the basis of the competencies and experiences of the practitioners working in the organisation. Implementing improved software processes in practice is, however, difficult. The new processes must be made available on different organisational levels and approached as frameworks for better software practice. A major challenge for a unit working with SPI efforts is to create strategies and mechanisms for managing knowledge about software development. Knowledge Management (KM) insights are therefore potentially useful in SPI efforts to facilitate the creation, modification, and sharing of software processes in an organisation. A number of studies have, in fact, argued for and illustrated the usefulness of applying KM to SPI. However, much needs to be done to further explore the practical use of KM in the context of SPI. This thesis reports on research in which KM was used to reflect upon and inspire SPI efforts in a software organisation over a two and a half-year period. The SPI efforts started with an assessment to establish the current capability of the organisation’s software practices. On the basis of the findings of that assessment, improvement efforts were planned and carried out to create new software processes. An implementation strategy was developed and different activities were planned and conducted to implement the new processes in different software projects. Further, two complementary approaches to KM, the codified and the personalised, were used to develop a KM strategy and different facilities to support knowledge sharing and continuous SPI efforts in the organisation. The study can be classified as research in the field of Information Systems (IS), focusing on the practical use of KM insights in SPI efforts and aiming to find answers to the following questions: 1) How can we make SPI happen in practice? 2) What are the main challenges in SPI from a KM perspective? 3) How can KM insights support SPI practice? The study illustrates that SPI in practice is about managing software knowledge. The key findings are: · To understand the main challenges in SPI from a practice point of view and make it happen in practice we need to distinguish between processes and practices and between process knowledge and practical knowledge and study the interaction between these types of knowledge as improvements are made. · SPI initiatives should emerge through personal growth, through knowledge creation, through knowledge adaptation, and through knowledge transformation on the individual level. · To address the practical issues of managing knowledge in SPI, the efforts should be organised as a project supported by a KM strategy focusing on the most characteristic features of the organisation in question and on improving practice in a stepwise manner. The strategy should include both codified and personalised approaches and change as the software organisation matures.