Software Practice in Small Software Companies: Development Context Constraints on Process Adoption.

Abstract

Small software companies (SSCs) interact with the immediate environment, exposing them to challenges that force the organization to undertake adjustments if it must survive and remain in business. These adjustments result into counterproductive practices and changes that create complexities in process adoption. This cross-sectional survey investigates the occurrences around the customer in the development context that affect the adoption of process in SSCs. To answer the research questions, we conducted a survey on 115 respondents and found out that although customer engagement has a significant relationship with reducing rework, inadequacies in the engagement due to the customer's lack of knowledge of software processes, triggers unstructured and ad-hoc methods in SSCs. The main contribution of this paper is a customer engagement framework that seeks to transform software processes by focusing on the customer as a pillar of achieving purpose and value to reduce development effort and time.