Defining a Requirements Process Improvement Model

Both software organisations and the academic community are aware that the requirements phase of software development is in need of further support. We address this problem by creating a specialised Requirements Capability Maturity Model (R-CMM¹). The model focuses on the requirements engineering process as defined within the established Software Engineering Institute’s (SEI’s) software process improvement framework. Our empirical work with software practitioners is a primary motivation for creating this requirements engineering process improvement model. Although all organisations in our study were involved in software process improvement (SPI), they all showed a lack of control over many requirement engineering activities.This paper describes how the requirements engineering (RE) process is decomposed and prioritised in accordance with maturity goals set by the SEI’s Software Capability Maturity Model (SW CMM). Our R-CMM builds on the SEI’s framework by identifying and defining recommended RE sub-processes that meet maturity goals. This new focus will help practitioners to define their RE process with a view to setting realistic goals for improvement.Sarah Beecham is a research fellow in the Department of Maths and Computing in The Open University in the UK. She is currently working on the EPSRC funded CRESTES project () looking into modelling resource estimation for long-lived software. She has recently completed her PhD for a program of work entitled “A Requirements-based Software Process Maturity Model”. Current research interests are in estimation for software evolution and maintenance and in the general areas of software process improvement. Her particular research interests are in empirical methods in software engineering and requirements engineering.Tracy Hall leads the Systems & Software Research Group in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire. She specialises in the empirical investigation of technical and non-technical issues within software engineering. During the past ten years Tracy has successfully collaborated with many companies on a variety of research projects. She is very active in the Empirical Software Engineering community and is regularly invited to talk about empirical methods both in the UK and abroad. Tracy is an accomplished researcher having published over twenty high quality journal papers.Austen Rainer Austen Rainer is a senior lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire. He studied for his PhD at Bournemouth University, in conjunction with IBM Hursley Park. His current research interests include open source software development, longitudinal case study research, and the credibility of empirical evidence for researchers and software practitioners.     

The personal software process: a cautionary case study

In 1995, Watts Humphrey introduced the Personal Software Process in his book, A Discipline for Software Engineering (Addison Wesley Longman, Reading, Mass.). Programmers who use the PSP gather measurements related to their own work products and the process by which they were developed, then use these measures to drive changes to their development behavior. The PSP focuses on defect reduction and estimation improvement as the two primary goals of personal process improvement. Through individual collection and analysis of personal data, the PSP shows how individuals can implement empirically guided software process improvement. The full PSP curriculum leads practitioners through a sequence of seven personal processes. The first and most simple PSP process, PSPO, requires that practitioners track time and defect data using a Time Recording Log and Defect Recording Log, then fill out a detailed Project Summary Report. Later processes become more complicated, introducing size and time estimation, scheduling, and quality management practices such as defect density prediction and cost-of-quality analyses. After almost three years of teaching and using the PSP, we have experienced its educational benefits. As researchers, however, we have also uncovered evidence of certain limitations. We believe that awareness of these limitations can help improve appropriate adoption and evaluation of the method by industrial and academic practitioners     

一种个体软件过程能力度量方法

个体软件过程(PSP)是由卡内基×梅隆大学软件工程研究所的Humphrey领导开发的.它是一种可用于控制、管理和改进个人工作方式的自我持续改进过程.随着工业界对软件过程改进需求的日益增长,PSP成为了软件组织为达成完全(从宏观到微观)量化过程管理研究中的一个热点课题.软件过程研究表明,高水平的个体软件过程能力是软件项目成功的关键,如何进行有效的个体软件过程能力度量是PSP中的一个核心问题.现有方法不能同时有效处理个体软件过程能力度量中的可变规模收益、多变量输入/输出以及决策者偏好问题.提出了一种综合了数据包络分析(DEA)和层次分析法(AHP)的个体软件过程能力评价方法——PSPADA,介绍了PSPADA的个体软件过程能力评价模型和核心算法(集成决策者偏好和估计规模收益).实验结果显示,PSPADA能够在考虑决策者偏好的同时,有效地进行多指标、规模收益可变的量化评估.     

Applying the PSP in industry

The Personal Software Process is designed for engineers working in isolated settings. The author describes a case study where he introduced the PSP in an industrial environment and that effort raised the issues of: training form and duration, resistance to change, independence and dependence between the single programmer and his or her team, overhead in data collection and tool support, and sustainability of measure. We addressed these problems by considerably modifying the PSP for that environment. One year after its introduction, only part of the PSP is still in use. The PSP proved to be more useful as a model to inspire a process improvement effort than as an off-the-shelf process to be reused without modification. Although the modifications cannot be generalized, the experience gained can     

一个基于Web的软件过程改进框架SPIF的实现

软件过程的理论日趋成熟，而基于软件过程改进模型的面向中小软件组织的应用程序却很少，因而造成一种情形，即管理者知道应该进行软件过程的改进，也知道有很多可以参考的规范与模型，但是，真正开始的时候，却不知道该如何着手。本文介绍一个基于Web的软件过程改进框架，试图给出一个解决问题的途径。该系统集成一组管理工具与相关知识库，用一种灵活的方式帮助组织确定适合自己的软件过程模型，从而以一种相对简洁方便的方式实现对软件过程的管理与改进。     

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.     

A Metamodel for Assessable Software Development Methodologies

Software development methodologies usually contain guidance on what steps to follow in order to obtain the desired product. At the same time, capability assessment frameworks usually assess the process that is followed on a project in practice in the context of a process reference model, defined separately and independently of any particular methodology. This results in the need for extra effort when trying to match a given process reference model with an organisation’s enacted processes. This paper introduces a metamodel for the definition of assessable methodologies, that is, methodologies that are constructed with assessment in mind and that contain a built-in process reference model. Organisations using methodologies built from this metamodel will benefit from automatically ensuring that their executed work conforms to the appropriate assessment model. Cesar Gonzalez-Perez is a post-doctoral research fellow in the Faculty of Information Technology at UTS, where he is currently researching with Professor Henderson-Sellers in object-oriented methodologies, with particular emphasis on metamodelling and component-based, assessable methodologies. He is the founder and former technical director of Neco, a company based in Spain specializing in software development support services, which include the deployment and use of the OPEN/Metis methodology at small and mid-sized organizations. He has also worked for the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain as a researcher in computing & archaeology, and received his Ph.D. in this topic in 2000. Tom McBride has more than twenty years in the computer industry in positions ranging from computer operator, developer, project manager to QA manager. He is significantly involved in standards development, both locally in Australia and internationally for the International Standards Organisation. Tom is Chairman of the Australian Computer Society National Standards Committee and is assisting the development of the OOSPICE Component Based Development methodology. He is also a lecturer in software development-related subjects at the University of Technology, Sydney and is currently enrolled as a Ph.D.student investigating coordination in software development. Brian Henderson-Sellers is Director of the Centre for Object Technology Applications and Research and Professor of Information Systems at UTS. He is author of eleven books on object technology and is well-known for his work in OO methodologies (MOSES, COMMA, OPEN, OOSPICE) and in OO metrics. Brian has been Regional Editor of Object-Oriented Systems, a member of the editorial board of Object Magazine/Component Strategies and Object Expert for many years and is currently on the editorial board of Journal of Object Technology and Software and Systems Modelling. He was the Founder of the Object-Oriented Special Interest Group of the Australian Computer Society (NSW Branch) and Chairman of the Computerworld Object Developers’ Awards committee for ObjectWorld 94 and 95 (Sydney). He is a frequent, invited speaker at international OT conferences. In 1999, he was voted number 3 in the Who’s Who of Object Technology (Handbook of Object Technology, CRC Press, Appendix N). He is currently a member of the Review Panel for the OMG’s Software Process Engineering Model (SPEM) standards initiative and is a member of the UML 2.0 review team. In July 2001, Professor Henderson-Sellers was awarded a Doctor of Science (D.Sc.) from the University of London for his research contributions in object-oriented methodologies.     

软件过程评估和改进

软件过程为软件的发展提供了组织、管理、度量、支持和改进的方法。文章对当前主流的软件过程评估和改进的标准(包括ISO、CMM、Bootstrap和QIP等)进行了分析比较,并在此基础上提出了过程模型语言(PML)和基于过程敏感性的软件工程环境(PSEE)等软件过程技术。     

A comparison of four process metamodels and the creation of a new generic standard

Software development processes and methodologies to date have frequently been described purely textually. However, more recently, a number of metamodels have been constructed to both underpin and begin to formalize these methodologies. We have critically examined four of these: the Object Management Group's Software Process Engineering Metamodel (SPEM), the OPEN Process Framework (OPF), the OOSPICE metamodel for capability assessment and the LiveNet approach for computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW). Based on this analysis, a new, combined metamodel, named Standard Metamodel for Software Development Methodologies (SMSDM) has been constructed which supports not only process but also products and capability assessment in the contexts of both software development and CSCW. As a proof of concept we conclude with a partial example to show how the SMSDM metamodel (and by inference the other metamodels) are used in practice by creating a simple yet usable methodology.     

SPICE: Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination

In June 1991, the International Standards group for Software Engineering approved a study period to investigate the need and requirements for a standard for software process management. A new international work item has been subsequently raised. The resulting project is named SPICE (Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination). The project aims to build on the best features of existing software assessment methods.     

Tradeoff and Sensitivity Analysis in Software Architecture Evaluation Using Analytic Hierarchy Process

Software architecture evaluation involves evaluating different architecture design alternatives against multiple quality-attributes. These attributes typically have intrinsic conflicts and must be considered simultaneously in order to reach a final design decision. AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process), an important decision making technique, has been leveraged to resolve such conflicts. AHP can help provide an overall ranking of design alternatives. However it lacks the capability to explicitly identify the exact tradeoffs being made and the relative size of these tradeoffs. Moreover, the ranking produced can be sensitive such that the smallest change in intermediate priority weights can alter the final order of design alternatives. In this paper, we propose several in-depth analysis techniques applicable to AHP to identify critical tradeoffs and sensitive points in the decision process. We apply our method to an example of a real-world distributed architecture presented in the literature. The results are promising in that they make important decision consequences explicit in terms of key design tradeoffs and the architecture's capability to handle future quality attribute changes. These expose critical decisions which are otherwise too subtle to be detected in standard AHP results. Liming Zhu is a PHD candidate in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at University of New South Wales. He is also a member of the Empirical Software Engineering Group at National ICT Australia (NICTA). He obtained his BSc from Dalian University of Technology in China. After moving to Australia, he obtained his MSc in computer science from University of New South Wales. His principle research interests include software architecture evaluation and empirical software engineering. Aybüke Aurum is a senior lecturer at the School of Information Systems, Technology and Management, University of New South Wales. She received her BSc and MSc in geological engineering, and MEngSc and PhD in computer science. She also works as a visiting researcher in National ICT, Australia (NICTA). Dr. Aurum is one of the editors of “Managing Software Engineering Knowledge”, “Engineering and Managing Software Requirements” and “Value-Based Software Engineering” books. Her research interests include management of software development process, software inspection, requirements engineering, decision making and knowledge management in software development. She is on the editorial boards of Requirements Engineering Journal and Asian Academy Journal of Management. Ian Gorton is a Senior Researcher at National ICT Australia. Until Match 2004 he was Chief Architect in Information Sciences and Engineering at the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Previously he has worked at Microsoft and IBM, as well as in other research positions. His interests include software architectures, particularly those for large-scale, high-performance information systems that use commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) middleware technologies. He received a PhD in Computer Science from Sheffield Hallam University. Dr. Ross Jeffery is Professor of Software Engineering in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW and Program Leader in Empirical Software Engineering in National ICT Australia Ltd. (NICTA). His current research interests are in software engineering process and product modeling and improvement, electronic process guides and software knowledge management, software quality, software metrics, software technical and management reviews, and software resource modeling and estimation. His research has involved over fifty government and industry organizations over a period of 15 years and has been funded from industry, government and universities. He has co-authored four books and over one hundred and twenty research papers. He has served on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, and the Wiley International Series in Information Systems and he is Associate Editor of the Journal of Empirical Software Engineering. He is a founding member of the International Software Engineering Research Network (ISERN). He was elected Fellow of the Australian Computer Society for his contribution to software engineering research.     

Results of applying the Personal Software Process

Too often, software developers follow inefficient methods and procedures. The Personal Software Process, developed by Watts Humphrey at the Software Engineering Institute, provides software engineers with a methodology for consistently and efficiently developing high quality products. The value of PSP has been shown in three case studies-three industrial software groups have used PSP and have collected data to show its effectiveness. They are: Advanced Information Services, Inc., Motorola Paging Products Group, and Union Switch and Signal Inc. Each has trained several groups of engineers and measured the results of several projects that used PSP methods. In all cases, the projects were part of the companies' normal operations and not designed for this study. The three companies offered a variety of situations useful for demonstrating the versatility of PSP. The projects at Motorola and US&S involved software maintenance and enhancement, while those at AIS involved new product development and enhancement. Among the companies, application areas included commercial data processing, internal manufacturing support, communications product support, and real time process control. Work was done in C or C++     

A Quality Software Process for Rapid Application Development

Software organizations can significantly improve the quality of their output if they have a defined and documented software process, together with the appropriate techniques and tools to measure its effectiveness. Without a defined process it is impossible to measure success or focus on how development capability can be enhanced. To date, a number of software process improvement frameworks have been developed and implemented. However, most of these models have been targeted at large-scale producers. Furthermore, they have applied to companies who use traditional development techniques. Smaller companies and those operating in development areas where speed of delivery is paramount have not, as yet, had process improvement paradigms available for adoption.This study examined the software process in a small company and emerged with the recommendation of the use of the Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM) and the Personal Software Process (PSP) for achieving software process improvement.     

Experiences in the Application of Software Process Improvement in SMES

During the last few years, many Software Process Improvement methods (SPI) have been presented to increase the quality of products and services provided by a software organization. Current Software Process Improvement (SPI) methods (i.e. ISO 15504, CBA-IPI,...), are difficult to apply to Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMES) due to the costs (financial, time, and resource) associated with their application. Also, these methods are principally focused on the assessment stage. This paper presents a new SPI method, called MESOPYME, which main focus is to reduce effort and time on the SPI implementation. This method focuses on the improvement implementation stage, which is based on a concept called Action Package, whose components are described (in Section 2.1.). The results obtained in the application of a Requirements Engineering Action Package in three organizations are also presented.     

成功实施软件过程改进的三个要素

ISO9000、CMM和CMMI在国内软件企业已经实施了相当一段时间,目前实施后的软件公司CMM/CMMI等级都上去了,可是效果却各不相同.本文从软件过程改进整个过程来探讨成功实施软件过程改进要注意的方方面面,以及如何才能够让软件过程改进取得最佳效果.     

Harmonization of ISO/IEC 9001:2000 and CMMI-DEV: from a theoretical comparison to a real case application

In the past years, both industrial and research communities in Software Engineering have shown special interest in Software Process Improvement—SPI. This is evidenced by the growing number of publications on the topic. The literature offers numerous quality frameworks for addressing SPI practices, which may be classified into two groups: ones that describe “what” should be done (ISO 9001, CMMI) and ones that describe “how” it should be done (Six Sigma, Goal Question Metrics-GQM). When organizations decide to adopt improvement initiatives, many models may be implied, each leveraging the best practices provided, in the quest to address the improvement challenges as well as possible. This may at the same time, however, generate confusion and overlapping activities, as well as extra effort and cost. That, in turn, risks generating a series of inefficiencies and redundancies that end up leading to losses rather than to effective process improvement. Consequently, it is important to move toward a harmonization of quality frameworks, aiming to identify intersections and overlapping parts, as well as to create a multi-model improvement solution. Our aim in this work is twofold: first of all, we propose a theoretical harmonization process that supports organizations interested in introducing quality management and software development practices or concerned about improving those they already have. This is done with specific reference to CMMI-DEV and ISO 9001 models in the direction “ISO to CMMI-DEV”, showing how GQM is used to define operational goals that address ISO 9001 statements, reusable in CMMI appraisals. Secondly, we apply the theoretical comparison process to a real case, i.e., a Small Enterprise certified ISO 9001.     

Software — A performing science?

Technical issues are important for software work, but so are personal disciplines, teamworking skills, and application‐domain knowledge. Also, much like an artistic performance, first‐class software engineering requires constant practice, good technique, and effective coaching. The challenge of producing high‐quality large‐scale software products is substantial today and will be even more demanding in the future. Without concerted action, we cannot expect software organizations' capabilities to improve. To address these problems, the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) has developed the Personal Software Process (PSP) and the Team Software Process (TSP). This paper addresses the problems of software engineering and discusses the intellectual nature of software work. It then reviews the characteristics of this kind of work and describes the principal conditions for effective software performance. In the conclusion, the author makes some observations about the challenges ahead and the future actions required. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Anecdotes [software history]

Walter Brown's recollection of Atlantic Software explains how the firm was one of the earliest formed specifically to market third-party software. In many ways, the rise and fall of Software Resources Corporation epitomized the software marketing environment of the late 1960s, as Robert V. Head recounts. Lawrence Welke describes, with his account of the ICP Directories, how they began in 1967 as the first public lists of program products for sale     

企业小组软件过程在管理学生软件开发中的研究与应用

我院将软件过程改善和小组软件过程的理论引入到项目实训中,在小组软件过程（TSP）的基础上提出了TSP的简化过程TSP-ST（Team Software Process-Student）,构建了开发过程模型,并将该模型应用到学生的项目实训中。本文介绍了TSP-ST在学生项目实训和毕业设计中的应用实践。