Impact of corporate and organic growth on software development

Abstract

Many small software companies grow in an organic and corporate manner. When growing, they have to make many organizational changes, mature their processes and adapt them to the rapidly growing customer base and product demands. This may be a challenging task bearing in mind the fact that software organizations lack guidelines for how to grow and mature their software processes in the context of business growth. In this paper, we map out one software company's corporate and organic growth in the course of its historical events and identify its impact on the company's software production processes and capabilities. We also list benefits, challenges, problems and lessons learned as experienced by the company studied. The paper rounds up with the suggestion for incorporating business growth elements into software process improvement models. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.