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Successful process improvement projects are no accidents
Author(s) -
Calderon Natalja Nikitina,
KajkoMattsson Mira,
Nolan Andrew James
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
journal of software: evolution and process
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.371
H-Index - 29
eISSN - 2047-7481
pISSN - 2047-7473
DOI - 10.1002/smr.1738
Subject(s) - checklist , process (computing) , capability maturity model , process management , variety (cybernetics) , maturity (psychological) , outcome (game theory) , business , computer science , software , engineering , engineering management , risk analysis (engineering) , knowledge management , psychology , developmental psychology , mathematical economics , artificial intelligence , cognitive psychology , programming language , operating system , mathematics
Despite substantial amount of research in software process improvement (SPI) and a wide variety of SPI approaches and software process maturity models, many of the SPI initiatives still fail. This is mainly because the improvement projects are found to be far more complex than expected from the beginning. They embrace a myriad of various organizational, managerial, process, and social properties that need to be considered, such as clear directions, full commitment, continuous sponsorship, and dedicated resources. Some of those properties have been already widely known within SPI arena while others have not yet been recognized. This paper identifies the properties that need to be fulfilled for making SPI projects successful and puts them into an SPI Checklist to be used in the assessment of SPI projects. It then reports on its pilot evaluation within 10 SPI projects at Rolls Royce . The evaluation results show a strong relationship between the fulfillment of the checklist items by the projects studied and the success rates of those projects. Thereby, the results provide a strong proof of concept demonstrating that the success of SPI projects is no accident but a foreseeable outcome of clearly identified and assessable characteristics. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.