Software quality management and software process improvement in Denmark

The software business is a fast growing industry sector and lack of quality has a significant consequence for society and economy. However, reports about unfinished development projects, project overrruns and system and software failures are still the rule. Software quality management (SQM) standards and software process improvement (SPI) methodologies are all promoted to solve these problems. However, little is known about how prevalent these standards and methodologies actually are. We have, therefore performed a questionnaire-based survey in the Danish software producing industry. The standards and methodologies are not known by 40% of the responding organizations. Only 36% of the enterprises use one or several of the approaches to some degree, while two thirds of the organizations that had not adopted any of the approaches had never heard about them. These and additional results about the use of standards and the problems with introducing standards are presented and discussed in detail in the paper.