Jos J. M. Trienekens

Product Focused Software Process Improvement: Concepts and Experiences from Industry

Management problems in the development of software have been addressed over the last years by a strong focus on the improvement of the development processes. Software process improvement (SPI) activities are characterized by an internal focus on a software development department and its procedures. However, the quality of the product is hardly addressed in software process improvement programs. This paper presents the application of a model for product focused SPI (P-SPI) and describes experiences with this model in practice. The main conclusions are that P-SPI puts products to be developed in a central position in improvement programs, results in fulfilling specific quality goals of a company and project, and industrial experiments show interesting benefits. Applying the approach in industrial projects showed that P-SPI is relatively cheap and gives fast results and high benefits.

Towards a metrics based verification and validation maturity model

Many organizations and industries continuously struggle to achieve a foundation of a sound verification and validation process. Because verification and validation is only marginally addressed in software process improvement models like CMMI, a separate verification and validation improvement model has been developed. The framework of the improvement model presented in this paper is based on the Testing Maturity Model (TMM). However considerable enhancements are provided, such as a V&V assessment procedure and a detailed metrics program to determine effectiveness and efficiency of the improvements. This paper addresses the development approach of MB-V2M2, an outline of the model, early validation experiments, current status and future outlook. The resulting model is dubbed MB-V2M2 (Metrics Based Verification@Validation Maturity Model).

Entropy based software processes improvement

Actual results of software process improvement projects show different levels of success. Although many software development organisations have adopted improvement models such as CMMI, it appears to be difficult to improve software development processes in the right way, e.g. tuned to the actual needs of the organisation. This paper presents a new approach to determine the direction of improvement for an organisation. This approach is based on an elaboration of the concept of entropy. The approach is empirically validated by carrying out interviews in 11 software development organisations in The Netherlands. The results of the research show that software development organisations can be classified and can be positioned on the basis of their internal and external entropy, c.q. the level of (dis)order in the business system and its environment. Based on a possible out-of-balance situation between the internal and external entropy, directions for software process improvement can be discussed. As such the proposed approach can support the application of current software process improvement methodologies such as the CMMI.

The importance of life cycle modeling to defect detection and prevention

In many low mature organizations dynamic testing is often the only defect detection method applied. Thus, defects are detected rather late in the development process. High rework and testing effort, typically under time pressure, lead to unpredictable delivery dates and uncertain product quality. This paper presents several methods for early defect detection and prevention that have been in existence for quite some time, although not all of them are common practice. However, to use these methods operationally and scale them to a particular project or environment, they have to be positioned appropriately in the life cycle, especially in complex projects. Modeling the development life cycle, that is the construction of a project-specific life cycle, is an indispensable first step to recognize possible defect injection points throughout the development project and to optimize the application of the available methods for defect detection and prevention. This paper discusses the importance of life cycle modeling for defect detection and prevention and presents a set of concrete, proven methods that can be used to optimize defect detection and prevention. In particular, software inspections, static code analysis, defect measurement and defect causal analysis are discussed. These methods allow early, low cost detection of defects, preventing them from propagating to later development stages and preventing the occurrence of similar defects in future projects.

Software reference architectures - exploring their usage and design in practice

Software reference architectures have been around for quite some years. They have been designed and used with varying success. We have conducted an exploratory survey among software architects and developers to establish the extent to which SRA have penetrated among practitioners and to identify the benefits and problems practitioners face when using and designing SRA. In this article, we present our findings.

Targets, drivers and metrics in software process improvement: Results of a survey in a multinational organization

This paper reports on a survey amongst software groups in a multinational organization. The survey was initiated by the Software Process Improvement (SPI) Steering Committee of Philips, a committee that monitors the status and quality of software process improvement in the global organization. The paper presents and discusses improvement targets, improvement drivers, and metrics, and the degree to that they are being recognized in the software groups. The improvement targets ‘increase predictability’ and ‘reduce defects’ are being recognized as specifically important, joined for Capability Maturity Model (CMM) level three groups by ‘increase productivity’ and ‘reduce lead time’. The set of improvement drivers that was used in the survey appears to be valid. Three improvement drivers that were rated highest were: ‘commitment of engineering management’, ‘commitment of development staff, and ‘sense of urgency’. Finally, it could be seen that metrics activity, both in size and in quality, increases significantly for CMM level three groups. However, no consensus regarding what metrics should be used can be seen.

Toward objective software process information: experiences from a case study

A critical problem in software development is the monitoring, control and improvement in the processes of software developers. Software processes are often not explicitly modeled, and manuals to support the development work contain abstract guidelines and procedures. Consequently, there are huge differences between ‘actual’ and ‘official’ processes: “the actual process is what you do, with all its omissions, mistakes, and oversights. The official process is what the book, i.e., a quality manual, says you are supposed to do” (Humphrey in A discipline for software engineering. Addison-Wesley, New York, 1995). Software developers lack support to identify, analyze and better understand their processes. Consequently, process improvements are often not based on an in-depth understanding of the ‘actual’ processes, but on organization-wide improvement programs or ad hoc initiatives of individual developers. In this paper, we show that, based on particular data from software development projects, the underlying software development processes can be extracted and that automatically more realistic process models can be constructed. This is called software process mining (Rubin et al. in Process mining framework for software processes. Software process dynamics and agility. Springer Berlin, Heidelberg, 2007). The goal of process mining is to better understand the development processes, to compare constructed process models with the ‘official’ guidelines and procedures in quality manuals and, subsequently, to improve development processes. This paper reports on process mining case studies in a large industrial company in The Netherlands. The subject of the process mining is a particular process: the change control board (CCB) process. The results of process mining are fed back to practice in order to subsequently improve the CCB process.

Business-oriented process improvement: practices and experiences at Thales Naval The Netherlands (TNNL)

Over the last decade many organizations are increasingly concerned with the improvement of their hardware/software development processes. The Capability Maturity Model and ISO9001 are well-known approaches that are applied in these initiatives. However, one of the major bottlenecks to the success of process improvement is the lack of business goal orientation. Additionally, business-oriented improvement approaches often show a lack of process orientation. This paper reports on a process improvement initiative at Thales Naval Netherlands that attempts to combine the best of both worlds, i.e. process improvement and business goal orientation. Main factors in this approach are goal decomposition and the implementation of goal-oriented measurement on three organizational levels, i.e. the business, the process and the team level.

A Maturity Model for Scaling Agile Development

Although the agile software development approaches have gained wide acceptance in practice, the concerns regarding the scalability and integration of agile approaches in traditional system development organizations have remained. The difficulty of adopting agile practices increases when there is a need to scale these practices. Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) has emerged as a solution to address some of these concerns. Despite few encouraging results of SAFe adoption, case studies indicate several challenges of SAFe adoption. Currently, there is a lack of a well-structured gradual approach for implementing and establishing SAFe. Before and during SAFe adoption, organizations require a uniform model for assessing the current state and progress, and for establishing a roadmap for the initiative. To address this need, we developed a maturity model for adopting agile and SAFe practices. Taking an existing agile maturity model as the basis, we extended the model with practices that are key to scaling agile practices for the SAFe. The model is developed and refined using a Delphi study. Subsequently, a case study was conducted in a large organization where the model was applied to assess the maturity level of the organization in adopting SAFe.

Process mining support for Capability Maturity Model Integration-based software process assessment, in principle and in practice

Currently used software process improvement methods such as the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) rely in their process assessments on information, which is gathered during interviews, in oral audit sessions, and from quality manuals and process standard reviews. Although valuable information about software processes can be gained in these assessments, the resulting data quality can be improved upon. This paper investigates the potential of process mining to support current software process assessment and improvement approaches. Based on an analysis of CMMI from a process mining perspective, particular CMMI model components are identified for which it is in principle possible to apply process mining techniques. Subsequently, criteria have been defined to select, with respect to these particular CMMI components, software processes for which process mining has an added value. These criteria have been applied in the selection of a particular ‘minable’ software process, that is, a change control process. Subsequently, the results of a case study from industrial practice, on the process mining of a change control board process, are used to illustrate that process mining can provide CMMI assessors with relevant information. This information reflects the actual or ‘real’ software processes in practice, and as such, it offers an excellent basis to support assessors in understanding the ‘actual’ software processes. Copyright