Enterprise-oriented software development environments to support software products and processes quality improvement

Abstract

Software organizations have to adapt efficiently to cope with clients needs changes and new and evolving technologies in order to guarantee business success. Moreover, organizations must continuously enhance their capability to develop software in order to increase products and processes quality. These characteristics constitute dynamic environments that require specific competences from software engineers such as knowledge related to software technologies, ability to adapt software processes concerning project characteristics, and experience on product and process quality management. This paper presents enterprise-oriented software development environments that support software engineers to execute software processes more effectively and to produce products with better quality. A main feature of these environments is the support offered to organizational knowledge management. Thus the paper also presents the main characteristics of the knowledge management infrastructure integrated to those environments. The practical experience using the environments has shown several benefits, such as an increase of product and process quality, and the preservation of organizational knowledge related to software processes and the development of software products. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.