Applied Software Project Management

Software Process Improvement

Software process improvement is the art and science of changing an organization's software process in order to build better software. In the first part of this book, you learned to diagnose and fix problems for individual projects. When you adopt a specific tool for your project—for example, if you implement inspections on your project team and have them all follow the script in Chapter 5—you are formalizing part of the software process for that project by having the team follow a written description of that activity. Software process improvement is very similar, except that instead of improving one project at a time, you work on improving the entire organization.

The tools and techniques in the first part of this book make up many of the nuts and bolts of software process improvement . But while this book so far has been about making specific improvements to the way software is built on the scale of an individual project, there is another perspective: the high-level organizational perspective. It's very important to diagnose chronic problems your organization is having and address them with specific practices to be adopted for all projects. By stepping back and looking at the software process as a whole, you may be able to plan ahead and anticipate the inefficiencies in the way your team develops software. In doing so, you can avoid problems before they have serious impact on your organization. That is where software process improvement can really help ...