New Practices to Structure and Elicit Improvement Opportunities in Scientific Software Development Teams

This paper presents ongoing research on a new approach to structure and elicit improvement opportunities in the software development process followed by technical-scientific teams. The bottom-up approach has been proved as more effective in process improvement applied to technical and scientific environments, in opposition to standard improvement models such as ISO or CMMI. However, when bottom-up is applied to elicit improvement areas, the method is usually limited to the use of surveys that miss many of the root causes and structural deficiencies. To complement the elicitation process, we propose the use of requirement-gathering techniques such as Card Sorting, Kelly Grid and Multi-Voting. Initial results are discussed in this paper.