Software process improvement in small and medium software enterprises: a systematic review

Abstract

Small and medium enterprises are a very important cog in the gears of the world economy. The software industry in most countries is composed of an industrial scheme that is made up mainly of small and medium software enterprises-SMEs. To strengthen these types of organizations, efficient Software Engineering practices are needed-practices which have been adapted to their size and type of business. Over the last two decades, the Software Engineering community has expressed special interest in software process improvement (SPI) in an effort to increase software product quality, as well as the productivity of software development. However, there is a widespread tendency to make a point of stressing that the success of SPI is only possible for large companies. In this article, a systematic review of published case studies on the SPI efforts carried out in SMEs is presented. Its objective is to analyse the existing approaches towards SPI which focus on SMEs and which report a case study carried out in industry. A further objective is that of discussing the significant issues related to this area of knowledge, and to provide an up-to-date state of the art, from which innovative research activities can be thought of and planned.

Blending Process Assessment and Employees Competencies Assessment in Very Small Entities

“…A meta-analysis [3] about case studies reporting process improvement approaches for 122 SMEs states that the ISO/IEC15504 model was used only in 9% of the reported improvement efforts, which would tend to support that a 15504-based approach for VSE process assessment may not be the most appropriate approach. Accordingly, the first research question addressed in this paper is: How small organizations or projects can use the ISO/IEC 29110 standard to effectively monitor their progress and to evaluate their performance?…”

Incremental Method Enactment for Computer Aided Software Engineering Tools

“…The success of process improvement is highly dependent on contextual factors that go beyond the improvement content. In their analysis of SPI success in small to medium enterprises, [20] have determined multiple success factors, two of which are particularly important in the context of this research:…”

“…This procedure must follow an iterative and incremental approach (prioritize the improvement points defined by the organization) that allows a continuous adoption of improvement practices." [20] -"Tackle the problem of improvement from the technical perspective." [20] The first of these two factors or guidelines lays at the core of what is called incremental method evolution or incremental process improvement, which deals with the step-wise improvement of process development processes [26].…”

“…[20] -"Tackle the problem of improvement from the technical perspective." [20] The first of these two factors or guidelines lays at the core of what is called incremental method evolution or incremental process improvement, which deals with the step-wise improvement of process development processes [26]. Incremental method evolution focuses on delivering tools and techniques that enable small, local changes to a method with the goal to minimize the overall disturbances on a business process and to allow for an iterative and 'natural' approach to process improvement.…”

Mapping CMMI Level 2 to Scrum Practices: An Experience Report

“…These improvements have been reported for example by Galin et al [3] who analyzed more than 400 projects during the 1990s about plan-driven software development methods where continuous CMMI-based SPI (Software Process Improvement) strategies were applied. However, medium and small organizations, usually featured by sparse resources, have a lot of difficulties to apply CMMI [4] [5] [6]. Some reported data prove that over 77 percent of process improvements have taken longer than expected, and over 68 percent have cost more than expected too [7].…”