Improvement of software development processes, balancing internal and external organizational aspects

Abstract

Actual results of software process improvement projects happen to be quite disappointing in practice. Although many software development organisations have adopted improvement models such as CMMI, it appears to be difficult to improve software development processes in the right way. This paper presents a new approach to determine the direction of improvement for an organisation. This approach is based on literature research as well as an empirical investigation among software development organisations in The Netherlands. The results of the research show that software development organisations can be classified on the basis of their internal and external entropy, c.q. the level of (dis)order in the business system and its environment. Based on a possible imbalance between the internal and external entropy, directions for software process improvement can be determined. As such the new approach can complement and improve the application of current software process improvement methodologies, e.g. CMMI. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.