Bringing total quality in to software teams: A frame for higher performance

Abstract

The current trends in most software-intensive product development organizations are in striving for high performance. Overall, software product creation has become more and more value-driven. However, from the customer and user satisfaction points of view “software” itself has no value until it is executed in some target machine (including embedded systems) producing certain results. Those outcomes (e.g., web services) bring benefits and even delight which are valued by the customers in terms of quality. In order to address those considerations, this paper proposes a software team-oriented performance analysis and improvement framework supported by provisional instrumentation. The aim is to gauge Lean software teams and organizations to advance their thinking towards the total quality perspective. The industrial cases demonstrate, how it is able to catalyst such team performance drivers and quality aims of software development under different circumstances.