Software Process Improvement: A systematic literature review

CONTEXT - Software Process Improvement (SPI) initiatives create new and improve existing processes to increase productivity, customer satisfaction, quality of product while reducing cost, and time to market thus maximizing Return on investments. OBJECTIVE - The main focus of this paper is to know about the state of art in SPI and to find out the strength of evidence in empirical work reported within SPI literature. METHOD - Methodology of systematic literature review (SLR) is used. A protocol has been developed and executed. Search strings developed and mentioned in the protocol were applied to the databases to extract relevant papers. A set of papers were identified after reading abstracts of papers extracted after application of search string. A quality criterion was applied on this set to finally select the studies for data extraction. Currently, we are at the data extraction phase of SLR. EXPECTED OUTCOME - The anticipated outcome of this systematic review will be state of art in SPI including widely used tools, models, and techniques; reasons to initiate SPI; SPI challenges/Issues widely reported; the SPI areas which are under more consideration; the SPI areas that lack of attention; frequencies of empirical studies in each of the SPI sub-areas.