Critical issues in SPI Programs: A Holistic View.
Résumé
With the competitive market in the domain of Information Technology (IT), companies are forced to expand their field to offer not only the service of software development, as well as direct customer services (e.g., help desk) or specialist technology services (e.g., testing and quality certification of systems). In this context, to apply software process improvement (SPI) requires addressing different needs and, therefore, the use of different models and standards. In this paper, we propose to use a holistic view to look at the whole company in planning a SPI program. This is done by defining that which we call critical issues, as elicited from stakeholders on the strategic, tactical and operational levels of the company. Critical issues are those which the stakeholders consider very important to have in the company in terms of software process but that they perceive the company does not have or is deficient in. Critical issues support SPI planning as well as a return on investment (ROI) evaluation, in a complete strategy for SPI institutionalization. Preliminary results obtained show that the critical issues are useful to steer the planning effort in the SPI program so to deal with that which is critical for the company.