A practitioner’s guide to light weight software process assessment and improvement planning

Software Process Improvement in Inter-departmental Development of Software-Intensive Automotive Systems – A Case Study

“…These difficulties are probably related to the fact that it is hard to describe the issues only through written text. The value of discussing and clarifying the improvement issues before letting the subjects prioritize and identify dependencies is pointed out in [13,17]. Thus, the aim of obtaining validity between the workshop and survey by not providing additional information about the improvement issues in the workshop can be questioned.…”

“…Second, to ensure the quality of the packaging, it was presented in a second workshop, where the workshop subjects and the research team reviewed and evaluated the results. Furthermore, the subjects were asked to evaluate the IP method used with regard to their perception of some of the main concerns in SPI (commitment, and involvement), reliability, usefulness of the method, and validity of the results [13,17]. For this we developed and used a self-completion questionnaire (see Table 2 in section 4.2).…”

“…We also present the design for evaluating this method and validating its results The SPI methodology used in this study is based on iFLAP [17] and its predecessor [12,13]. IFLAP was chosen mainly because of two factors: (1) iFLAP and its predecessors have been proven to be scalable and useful in industry, especially in the automotive domain [17,23], and (2) concerns the studied organizations' limitations in allocating the necessary resources for the SPI project. Commencing top-down SPI effort such as CMMI [24] or Automotive SPICE [25] would not have been possible due to the large amount of resources required [26].…”

“…Prioritizing the nine improvement issues in this study gave 36 comparisons. In comparison to AHP, CV is a more straightforward and easy prioritization technique, and its scalability is better [17,37]. As AHP brings the benefits of consistency checking but with limited scalability it was chosen for the workshop while CV (100$-test) was chosen for the survey due to the fact that simplicity and completion time are critical factors for the response rate on survey questionnaires [39].…”

“…The SPI was undertaken at two Swedish automotive companies: Volvo Car Corporation (VCC) and Volvo Truck Corporation (VTC) utilizing the iFLAP framework (improvement Framework utilizing Light weight Assessment and improvement Planning) as described in [17]. This paper presents a study on the improvement planning (IP) of nine improvement issues identified in the prior process assessment (PA) step in iFLAP reported in [11].…”