Javier García Guzmán

Integration of strategic management, process improvement and quantitative measurement for managing the competitiveness of software engineering organizations

Strategic management is a key discipline that permits companies to achieve their competitive goals. An effective and explicit alignment and integration of business strategy with SPI initiatives based on measurement is essential to prevent loss of income, customers and competitiveness. By integrating SPI models and measurement techniques in the strategy management process, an organization’s investments will be better aligned with strategy, optimizing the benefits obtained as a result of an SPI program. In this paper, the authors propose BOQM (Balanced Objective-Quantifiers Methodology) that integrates properly strategic management, process improvement and quantitative measurement to manage the competitiveness of software engineering organizations. Finally, this paper presents and discusses the results from implementing BOQM in a software development organization.

Living Labs for User-Driven Innovation: A Process Reference Model

OVERVIEW: Living labs are innovation infrastructures within which software companies and research organizations collaborate with lead users and early adopters in creating participative strategies to define, design, develop, and validate new products and services that maximize the socioeconomic conditions of the partnership. For this kind of innovation cluster to succeed, it must implement effective practices to manage the collaboration. However, there is currently no process reference model for efficient practices to manage a living lab. A case study involving six living labs was carried out to create and validate a process reference model for living labs.

Patterns as objects to manage knowledge in software development organizations

The application of knowledge management strategies is essential to solve several process improvement problems in software engineering organizations. In this area, the definition and use of process patterns is an approach that several authors have extensively discussed. Nevertheless, one of the problems is the difficulty of formalizing the knowledge about the development process using patterns. This article presents the sdPP (Software Development Project Pattern) to support the management of knowledge objects that encapsulate information about the recommended practices to develop specific software projects, including explicit and tacit knowledge on software engineering effective practices. The proposal comprises a data model to define the sdPPs as knowledge objects and a tool to manage their life cycle. The authors carried out an experimental validation where 48 junior software engineers applied the sdPP framework. From the results obtained, we discuss the factors that facilitate the correct creation of sdPPs and the improvement of software product quality using the sdPP proposal. We also analyse the effort to implement the sdPP proposal to introduce knowledge management practices in software development projects and determine usefulness of the knowledge assets to adapt the sdPP framework for effective knowledge sharing in software engineering organizations.

Success Factors for the Management of Global Virtual Teams for Software Development

The management of globally distributed software teams is complex because of problems of linguistic differences, geographical dispersion, different time zones, and the cultural diversity of the team members; what is particularly common in software development environments. These problems are amplified when a single software development team is composed of highly skilled individuals working in dispersed geographical locations, and they have to work as a team across distances. This paper describes several of the most important factors that contribute to the correct and effective management of global virtual teams for software development and underlying solutions are addressed to reduce cultural and time barriers. These factors are obtained from an industrial case study, which lasted 36 months, corresponding to a huge software development project that involved several global virtual teams. These success factors consider different perspectives as technology, human factors and process.

IT innovation strategy: managing the implementation communication and its generated knowledge through the use of an ICT tool

Purpose Without effective implementation, no information technology (IT) strategy can succeed. There has been much re-search into IT planning, but few studies have developed one of the most important phases of IT strategy: IT Implementation. IT implementation can be improved at information and communication technology (ICT) organizations through the use of organization learning models (OLM) and the implementation of ICT tools. This paper has two purposes define an OLM framework that determines the best practices to increase knowledge at individual, group and/organizational levels, and define and implement an ICT tool to facilitate the integration and institutionalization of the OLM. The ICT tool is based on the technology roadmapping technique that allows an organization to manage at an executive level what, when and how the IT strategy is going to be implemented. Design/methodology/approach This paper is based on a case study performed at an ICT organization that provides ICT services to financial institutions. The study was carried out in 2014. It analyzed over 24,000 projects, which translated into an equivalent of more than 18 million man-hours. The proposal was assessed at a very large ICT organization. Findings This paper proposes a framework called SPIDER to effectively implement OLMs based on Big Data management principles for monitoring and reporting current status of IT innovation strategies. These kinds of approaches contribute to solve the problems identified in the state-of-the-art regarding the communication and monitoring the implementation status of IT innovation strategies. During this research work, several factors that are essential to implement these kinds of approaches in large banking organizations were identified: effort required to elaborate the monitoring and reporting activities; easiness to understand the reported information; detailed planning of the implementation program; and focus on communication efficiency. Originality/value This paper determined the best practices to manage knowledge generated during the implementation of an IT strategy. Additionally, this paper defined and implemented an ICT tool to properly communicate and monitor the implementation of an IT innovation strategy, based on technological roadmap techniques.

Modeling software development practices using reusable project patterns: a case study

Software process improvement in software development organizations is a complex task that can be solved using knowledge management strategies. The definition and use of process patterns is a proven approach to apply knowledge management strategies in software engineering organizations. One of the main problems for the effective application of process patterns is the difficulty of formalizing the knowledge about the development process using these approaches.