Applied Software Project Management

Chapter 12. Process Improvement

If you ask a dozen people on a software team to describe how the team should build software, you'll get at least a dozen different answers—and most of those descriptions, if followed, will produce something. But what's produced may not be very good: it may not be useful to the users, it may not be of very high quality, and the team may not be comfortable building, delivering, or maintaining it. A software process makes sure that everyone on the team agrees up front on how they will build software, while simultaneously ensuring that the software will be built in a way that works for the team and the organization.

Life Without a Software Process

Many process improvement experts see the world as black and white: there are bad software teams without a formal process , and good teams that have one in place. But the world is not that simple. You should understand exactly what a software process brings to the table, and why having a process is important.

Teams Can Be Effective Without a Formal Process

There are many successful teams that do not spend time looking at the big picture and writing down a software process. In most organizations like this, individual programmers or small teams are responsible for entire projects: they talk with the users and stakeholders to understand what they need from the software, they build the software, and they deliver it to the users. People in this situation get used to the "jack-of-all-trades" role—they do everything themselves, ...