In today's global competitive environment, organizations are always trying to improve their practices aiming to achieve higher levels of productivity, quality and competitiveness. Software process improvement (SPIdex) is one of the most used approaches to achieve these goals. However, this kind of initiative is not easy, and usually great investments are necessary. Therefore, determining the return on these investments is very important to justify them and keep high‐level management and project teams motivated for continuous improvement. In this article, we present quantitative results of return on investment (ROI) at BL Informática, a Brazilian small‐sized organization which is improving its processes since 2003 and is experiencing great success. We present the benefits regarding schedule, costs, productivity, quality, customer satisfaction and also financial benefits. Results show that investments in SPIdex really can pay off, as happened at BL Informática. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Among the different kinds of incident processing centers, the service desk has highlighted with the increasing number of its adopters around the world. Nonetheless, even though it has a series of desirable features and resources, a service desk needs several procedures to survive, without which it can severely suffer with inadequate or inexistent IT service management. In order to overcome this need, the framework of best IT practices, mostly known as ITIL, has been widely implemented on such scenarios. However, its adherence by service desk operators, has not always been as friendly as it should. The main reason for this can be made evident when considering how hard is to comply with so many recommendations laid out on such framework. Additionally, the technical staff attention and worry on complying with that framework is so great that incident treatment quality can be impaired. It is exactly on that challenge, where the persuasive technique named gamification arises here as a proposal to turn hard, tense or tedious tasks, that are commonly performed on this way on service desks, into more interesting and engaging activities in a daily basis. Through game design and elements, gamification can improve the service desk operators' motivation and engaging, by making them more involved in their job and consequentely optimizing the use and adherence of ITIL recommended IT best practices. In this scenario, since the more IT best practices are adequately followed and the more incident treatment quality increases, obviously the more IT service management quality would be improved.

A definição de processos de software com base em modelos de referência nacionais ou internacionais é importante, mas não suficiente para garantir a qualidade dos produtos de software. A garantia da execução adequada desses processos é fundamental para aumentar a eficiência e eficácia dos processos e, conseqüentemente, aumentar a qualidade dos produtos de software. Este trabalho apresenta uma abordagem de garantia de qualidade de processos e produtos de software com apoio de Gerência de Conhecimento na Estação TABA, um ambiente de desenvolvimento de software orientado a organização.