Romana Vajde Horvat

Managing the complexity of SPI in small companies

Most known models for SPI (e.g. SEI CMM, ISO standards and other methods derived from those mentioned) are primarily suited for large or medium organizations, but with some tailoring they provide substantial support also for the SPI in small organizations considering their specific characteristics. In the article a case of such tailoring – the PROCESSUS model – is presented. The baseline of the methodology is the integration of the CMM and the ISO 9001 together with the ISO 9000-3. According to the integrated model and the study of different lifecycles, a set of standard procedures (SP) and standard documents (SD) was defined. Each standard procedure provides guidelines on how to perform related activities, who is involved, which documents are supposed to be used/derived within the procedure etc. The set of SP and SD is the essential help for SPI conduction – for the purpose of small companies the optimal use of suggested documents and the disposition of roles was defined. The SP-SD set is also described in the article. Copyright

Comparative assessment of open source software using easy accessible data

Open source (usually free of charge) software has become increasingly prominent in last few years. Previous research of software being developed under open source license has showed, that some open source products can reach qualitative and popularity level of commercial (usually closed-source) counterparts. However, a lot of open source software do not attain maturity. This shows that their projects have problems and that the quality of projects outcomes (software) can vary. Therefore an assessment model is necessary which could filter out only suitable (qualitative) products. This paper presents a quantitative basis for evaluating an open source product based on multiple criteria of software quality. In contrary to other software assessment models, which are time-consuming and expensive, the proposed model uses easy accessible quantitative data, specific for open source projects. A set of measurements for evaluating open source software together with proposed model and a practical example is presented

PROCESSUS – Integration of SEI CMM and ISO quality models

Integration of the two best-known quality management models for software production and maintenance, the Capability Maturity Model and the ISO 9001 Model (including ISO 9000-3) is of great interest for both the European and the American software market. The definition of a quality management model which would conform to the requirements of both models and use the advantages of each was a key goal of our research work within the project PROCESSUS.1 Research work was conducted in two steps: first, the detailed comparison of both models was made in order to define their common issues and specifics of each model, and secondly, the integrated model based on the results of the comparison was defined. In this paper the comparison method and results are described. Further, a method for the integration and a framework of the integrated model are presented. The core of our work is actually the content of the integrated model. Due to extensive content of the integrated model examples of some parts only are given in the appendix. The integrated model presented in this paper has already been successfully used in organizations which are cooperating in the project PROCESSUS o these organizations achieved the needed maturity for certification to the ISO 9001 standard and a maturity level near level 3 of CMM.

Project Management Principles and Virtual Teams for Information Systems Development: Preliminary Proposal

The paper presents a review of previously published work and reports on the findings regard managerial control mechanisms of virtual teams working in an environment of virtual community. Within the preparing phase of the research we focused on open source virtual communities that work on larger projects for information system development. We also formed research questions that will guide us in the future research. This paper concludes with specific research needs in the study of virtual teams and their knowledge and use of project management principles.

OO metrics data gathering environment

Object technology has been recognized as an enabling factor and it is largely introduced into MIS departments. However, the benefits and improvements related to object technology are not obvious and could not be realized and achieved without appropriate evaluation criteria and metrics. The paper presents some evaluation criteria, measures and metrics, suitable for object oriented software development. Basic concepts of the OOMetDaGa Environment that provides automatic support for metrics data gathering are described and some empirical data presented.

Database Reusability in Intelligent Medical Systems

Reuse or reusability is not a specific, algorithmic, heuristic or only a simple set of guidelines. Database reuse means the use of an existing component—a database entity—in a new context, either elsewhere in the same system or in another system. According to different definitions, an intelligent system is a “power tool for thinking”; but on the other side it is only a kind of information system with built-in knowledge to support decisions made by human experts. Similar conclusions could be made for intelligent medical systems and introduce the database reusability in this environment with a purpose to increase the quality of an intelligent medical system. In the paper the problem of the database reusability will be presented more in detail, especially its integration in an intelligent medical system. Finally, the results of such integration and the benefits for the medicine will be discussed.

Quality management in software development process: an empirical model

A methodolgy/courseware for introducing such a quality system in software development organizations is described in this paper. The authors used the ISO standardization (ISO 9000-3: Standard for QA in design/development, production, installation and servicing) as the basis of the methodology and refined it with well known related process models. It is not limited to the standard but also concerns human factors regarding the continual improvements toward the quality system within training programs and group-work. The methodology is supported by an integrated software product which enables software process assessments and goal definitions and offers a hypertext based software-process-improvement knowledge base.

Skill card and certification system for certified EU project manager

The cooperation among European organization/individuals is recently most often conducted within common projects under specific EU programs. Efficiency of cooperation depends great deal on knowing the principles of management the distributed project and additionally to comply with the administrative, financial and regulative rules, accepted in EU. Even though a lot of different programs by which the EU co-finances activities in Europe exist, the common characteristics could be defined to be able to manage all types of EU projects. The article defines the knowledge required to manage EU project. It is structured in so called skill card for certified European project manager. The skill card model could be used for the unification of job descriptions all over the Europe. The training and certification scheme for the skill card is also presented in the article

Integration of strategic, tactical and technical OO measurement

For measurement to become cost effective and efficient it should be directed by business goals. Since our goal when introducing object technology is to build better software it is necessary to perform technical OO measurement and relate it not only to tactical but also to strategic goals. In the paper we present some concepts of an environment that might help us to integrate and provide compliance between different aspects of OO measurement.