Managing process improvement in virtual software corporations

Research in software engineering has addressed modelling of the software development process, evaluation of the individual software development organisation´s process, and development of programmes and methods of process improvement. As a consequence, software process improvement (SPI) has become an established specialism within software engineering, and a number of process modelling methods and tools are currently available to support work on software process modelling, evaluation and improvement. SPI work hitherto has concentrated on the organization level; but some of the application areas which are most challenging in terms of integrity and reliability frequently demand the formation of virtual corporations in order to bring together scarce competences and resources to meet functional and non-functional requirements and competitive demands. As yet little attention has been paid to the support of process improvement in such large multi-site, multi-organization virtual software corporation (VSC). These are usually of varying size and software process maturity; there is, therefore, now a need for research on process improvement to address a range of issues specific to the VSC. The paper identifies a number of such issues, including support for virtual software configuration, support for the collection of process measurement data across geographically distributed projects with heterogeneous tools and environments at the different sites, and flexible handling of exception conditions where a generic process model is the guarantor of conformance to process quality standards