Software Process Practices in Small Software Companies in Botswana

Abstract

In recognizing the potential that software can help in the socio-economic development of the country, the government of Botswana has identified software industry as one of the strategic priority areas in ICT with research focus on areas such as software engineering practices and software process improvement. To realize this vision, the state of software development practice has to be formally assessed to determine the strengths and weaknesses thereby providing input for the development of appropriate software development strategy for the country. However, the current state of software process practice has not yet been properly investigated. In this paper, we discuss the results of our study conducted to determine process performance and process capability of major software companies. The process assessment study was conducted following the METvalCOMPETISOFT assessment methodology. Our findings highlight the organizations' current software engineering practices by identifying strengths, major weaknesses and key areas for software process improvement. We also discuss our lightweight prototype tool developed for the management of process assessment in small companies.

A Decade of Software Engineering Best Practices Adoption in Small Companies: A Quasi-Systematic Mapping

“…In Brazilian Symposium on Computers in Education (Simpósio Brasileiro de Informática na Educação-SBIE) (Vol. 24,No. 1,p.…”

A roadmap for a comparison framework for an adaptable software process improvement framework in small software companies

“…Small companies often fail to afford the cost overrun, which is necessary for the popular frameworks. In Africa for example, the case is different although the SSC face the same challenges of lack of implementation of best practices, lack of adopted standards and generally disorganized software processes; there is also no evidence in literature, of attempts to localize the existing frameworks for SPI [32][33][34][35][36].…”

“…The success of a better software industry in places like Africa will be dependent on how much effort can be put to improve the status quo [36]. It is therefore high time since the industry is growing rapidly that we began to assess the software processes in Africa, in order to improve on quality of software.…”