From pragmatic to systematic software process improvement: an evaluated approach

Software processes improvement (SPI) is a challenging task, as many different stakeholders, project settings and contexts and goals need to be considered. SPI projects are often operated in a complex and volatile environment and, thus, require a sound management that is resource-intensive requiring many stakeholders to contribute to the process assessment, analysis, design, realisation and deployment. Although there exist many valuable SPI approaches, none address the needs of both process engineers and project managers. This article presents an artefact-based software process improvement and management approach (ArSPI) that closes this gap. ArSPI was developed and tested across several SPI projects in large organisations in Germany and Eastern Europe. The approach further encompasses a template for initiating, performing and managing SPI projects by defining a set of five key artefacts and 24 support artefacts. The authors present ArSPI and discus results of its validation indicating ArSPI to be a helpful instrument to set up and steer SPI projects.