Marcello Visconti

Conception, development and implementation of an e-Government maturity model in public agencies

Abstract Governments worldwide are encouraging public agencies to join e-Government initiatives in order to provide better services to their citizens and businesses; hence, methods of evaluating the readiness of individual public agencies to execute specific e-Government programs and directives are a key ingredient in the successful expansion of e-Government. To satisfy this need, a model called the eGovernment Maturity Model (eGov-MM) was developed, integrating the assessment of technological, organizational, operational, and human capital capabilities, under a multi-dimensional, holistic, and evolutionary approach. The model is strongly supported by international best practices, and provides tuning mechanisms to enable its alignment with nation-wide directives on e-Government. This article describes how the model was conceived, designed, developed, field tested by expert public officials from several government agencies, and finally applied to a selection of 30 public agencies in Chile, generating the first formal measurements, assessments, and rankings of their readiness for e-Government. The implementation of the model also provided several recommendations to policymakers at the national and agency levels.

An overview of industrial software documentation practice

A system documentation process maturity model and assessment procedure were developed and used to assess 91 projects at 41 different companies over a seven year period. During this time the original version evolved into a total of four versions based on feedback from industry and the experience gained from the assessments. This paper reports the overall results obtained from the assessments which strongly suggest that the practice of documentation is not getting a passing grade in the software industry. The results show a clear maturity gap between documentation practices concerned with defining policy and practices concerned with adherence to those policies. The results further illustrate the need to recognize the importance of improving the documentation process, and to transform the good intentions into explicit policies and actions.

The Tutelkan SPI Framework for Small Settings: A Methodology Transfer Vehicle

Software organizations aim to improve their processes to increase their productivity, competitiveness and performance. Although numerous standards and models have been proposed, their adoption among small organizations is hard due to some size mismatches and to lack of experienced process engineers, which forces them to hire (expensive) external consultants. This article describes the Tutelkan SPI Framework, which proposes a three-fold approach to this problem: (1) providing a library of reusable process assets, (2) offering composition tools to describe small organizations processes using these assets, and (3) systematically training small organization focused consultants for these library and toolset. The framework has been successfully piloted with several Chilean small companies, and the library and tools are open and freely available.

The Tutelkan Reference Process: A Reusable Process Model for Enabling SPI in Small Settings

The adoption of international standards and models of process quality is difficult for small organizations due to several issues they face, such as inability to afford the associated costs and unawareness of SPI benefits. This article presents the Tutelkan Reference Process (TRP), a public software process that is conformant to CMMI-DEV v1.2, ISO 9001:2000 and Competisoft, and whose process assets can be reused as baseline for developing specific software process in small organizations. We present the methods we applied to evaluate standard-compliance of TRP, which are based on mapping techniques and methods used to appraise and audit organizations, and discuss how TRP is applied as part of an SPI framework oriented to small settings. When using TRP organizations become aware of their level of compliance with international standards, since each reusable asset contains information about the specific CMMI-DEV v1.2 practices, ISO 9001:2000 clauses and Competisoft activities it conforms to.

Assessing the State of Software Documentation Practices

A system documentation process maturity model and assessment procedure were developed and used to assess 91 projects at 41 different companies over a seven year period. During this time the original version evolved into a total of four versions based on feedback from industry and the experience gained from the assessments. This paper reports the overall results obtained from the assessments which strongly suggest that the practice of documentation is not getting a passing grade in the software industry. The results show a clear maturity gap between documentation practices concerned with defining policy and practices concerned with adherence to those policies. The results further illustrate the need to recognize the importance of improving the documentation process, and to transform the good intentions into explicit policies and actions.

Agile commitments: enhancing business risk management in agile development projects

Agile methods focus on customer satisfaction and delivering business value early, however if flexibility and adaptability are not managed during the development project, agile methods could not assure achieving the overall business expectations. Customers require risk visibility over the main aspects that define its expectations: functionality (scope), budget, time-to-market, and product quality. These risks must be controlled and monitored during the project in order to introduce mitigation actions if needed. In this article, we propose an agile commitments framework based on the definition and follow-up of commitments between customer and developer. This framework aims to improving risk management by enhancing business expectation risk visibility, and also providing a negotiation baseline between customers and developers.

A Meta-model Framework for Software Process Modeling

We present a refined version of a meta-model process modeling framework that can be effectively used to identify key practices to initiate and sustain a software process improvement effort focused on a single process area. Our approach moves away from the overall software development process and computation of maturity levels and focuses on a particular process area or task and its key practices. In determining process key practices our framework considers process dimension, and quality and usability/costumer satisfaction of the products produced or services provided by the process. The refined version of the model gives suggested types of key practices and useful questions and hints for constructing these key practices. We show the completeness, flexibility and ease of using this proposed meta-model by applying it to two particular process areas, generating a set of key practices we believe adequately cover the key issues to properly drive a process improvement effort.

A measurement-based approach for implanting SQA and SCM practices

In recent years an increasing number of software organizations have launched initiatives to improve their software process. Unfortunately, most of them have been unable to move beyond diagnosis and action planning, turning those plans into real and practical actions. This paper focuses on two software process areas, software quality assurance (SQA) and software configuration management (SCM), and proposes a set of generic tools to assist in the implantation of specific practices for them. SQUID (Software QUality In the Development Process), a measurement-based methodology for specifying, monitoring and evaluating the software product quality during development, is adapted and used to manage the quality of implanting specific tools, such as guides, checklists and templates for SQA and SCM practices. We describe the results of a preliminary application conducted, showing how the proposed adaptation helps in formalizing and normalizing the implantation process, setting tangible goals and evaluating the results more precisely.

A Software Testing Process for the Reference Model of Competisoft

The reference model of Competisoft is composed of nine processes and a work within the context of the project Competisoft established some validation and verification activities in the process Software Development. Software test tasks are considered in the validation and verification activities, but these activities are not sufficient to define a Software Testing process in the organization which can be efficiently managed, controlled and improved. In this paper, we show how the reference model of Competisoft can be enhanced by adding another process called Software Testing. The main benefit for the organization is the promotion of a better control and management of software test tasks. A real-world case is shown in order to illustrate how an organization can deploy the process and the benefits that arise from that deployment.

Managing the Improvement of SCM Process

This article presents a framework for improving the Software Configuration Management (SCM) process, that includes a maturity model to assess software organizations and an approach to guide the transition from diagnosis to action planning. The maturity model and assessment tool are useful to identify the degree of satisfaction for practices considered key for SCM. The transition approach is also important because the application of a model to produce a diagnosis is just a first step, organizations are demanding the generation of action plans to implement the recommendations. The proposed framework has been used to assess a number of software organizations and to generate the basis to build an action plan for improvement. In summary, this article shows that the maturity model and action planning approach are instrumental to reach higher SCM control and visibility, therefore producing higher quality software.