Software process improvement based on the method engineering principles

Abstract

While it used to be a common belief that the use of rigorous methods in software development is beneficial if not compulsory to assure success of software development projects, the investigations in practice reveal developers often avoid to follow prescribed methods and that there is a wide gap between the organizations' official methods and the work actually performed by their developers in IT projects. According to the literature, there are many reasons contributing to this rather undesirable situation. The two of them are rigidity of methods and their social inappropriateness. In the MasterProc project we have addressed these issues by developing a framework and tool-support for the reengineering of software development methods. Using the framework an organisation can reengineer its existing ways of working into a method that is organisation-specific and auto-adjustable to specifics of its projects. The evaluation that was performed in five partner companies is motivating, as it shows the framework can be very useful in improving software development practice. This paper describes the framework philosophy and its main components. © 2007 International Federation for Information Processing.