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Quality improvement is critical to the success of software development organizations. Automated tools can greatly assist in the implementation of quality improvement. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the state of tool support of software process improvement.

The authors first review three quality improvement models that can be used for improving the quality of software products, and then identify the required activities of the quality improvement effort based on those models. These activities identified then serve as a reference list to determine the support provided by commercial tools. The paper then conducts two surveys of software quality improvement tools and presents the results.

The results from two surveys indicate that: there is no tool that supports problem identification; most tools can provide several software process improvement functions to help software organizations to improve their process capability and the quality of their products; and there is no set of tools that can provide a complete coverage of all improvement activities.

Although the authors have conducted a detailed search on the internet to identify SPI tools, such a survey will miss those tools which have no presence on the internet. However, the authors are confident that their results can reflect what is available in the marketplace.

Process practitioners will learn about the state of support available in the marketplace and what they may need to develop on their own to provide complete support for their improvement efforts.

The paper proposes a classification of software process improvement functions and present a first survey of software quality improvement tools. The results will be beneficial to process practitioners.

The paper seeks to explore the impact of events in Software Process Improvement (SPI) environments based on a longitudinal study of a requirements management initiative at Ericsson.

The paper presents the initiative from three perspectives – the improvement initiative, the targeted software practices, and the environment.

SPI initiatives easily get interrupted, are side‐tracked, and progress slowly due to changing environments. While most practitioners are painfully aware of this, the SPI literature has so far only touched on the issue. Agility principles would have helped Ericsson respond more effectively to events that impacted the initiative. Development of agile SPI practices requires coordination and alignment with other initiatives to develop agile software organizations.

SPI has been adopted by many organizations to help them to deliver quality software. However, its success is a matter of debate and this paper deals with the issues involved.

While the literature on software process improvement (SPI) offers a number of studies of small software firms, little is known about how such initiatives evolve over time. On this backdrop, this paper aims to investigate how adoption of SPI technology was shaped over a ten year period (1996‐2005) in a small Danish software firm.

The investigation is based on a longitudinal, interpretative case study of improvement efforts over a ten‐year period. To help structure the investigation, we focus on encounters that impacted engineering, management, and improvement practices within the firm. The study contributes to the SPI‐literature and the literature on organizational adoption of technology.

The paper finds the improvement effort fluctuating and shaped between management's attempt to control SPI technology adoption and events that caused the process to drift in unpredictable directions.

The experiences suggest that managers of small software firms remain flexible and constantly negotiate technology adoption practices between control and drift, creating momentum and direction according to firm goals through attempts to control, while at the same time exploring backtalk, options, and innovations from drifting forces inside and outside the firm.

Based on the research, the paper recommends substituting the “from control to drift” perspective on organizational adoption of complex technologies like SPI with a “negotiating control and drift” perspective.

The purpose of the article is to investigate the impact of organizational culture on software process improvement (SPI). Is cultural congruence between an organization and an adopted process model required? How can the level of congruence between an organizational culture and the values and assumptions underlying an adopted process model be assessed?

The competing values framework and its associated assessment instrument are used in a case study to establish an organizational culture profile of a software development business unit within the case company. The instrument is supplemented with a technique to produce culture profiles of texts such as process models like the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and the case company's quality management system. The different profiles are subsequently analyzed and compared.

The culture profile of the CMMI confirms previous research and depicts a result‐oriented, formalized, and structured organization. A comparison with the company's quality management system shows congruent culture profiles suggesting that the case company has succeeded in capturing underlying assumptions of the CMMI when updating the quality management system. The analysis also reveals the organizational culture profile of the business unit to be incongruent with the quality management system's profile. This disconfirms previous research claiming that congruence is a prerequisite. Further analysis reveals that actions were taken by managers in the case company to address the cultural challenges and successfully implement new processes. It is, therefore, concluded that cultural incongruence is not an insurmountable barrier to SPI. By comparing cultural profiles, some SPI implementation challenges become evident and that in turn allows for effective SPI management action.

The research is based on a single case study and that is sufficient to disconfirm existing research. Additional research is, however, needed to validate both the proposed text analysis technique as well as the proposed process for assessing and managing cultural challenges confronting SPI projects.

SPI managers are provided with a more complex view of organizational culture in which congruence is not a necessity. SPI managers can choose to compare culture profiles and decide how to address incongruences. To that end the text analysis technique is offered as a web service that allows for analysis of all text‐based process models and standards, and of internal process documentation.

The proposed culture management process, including the text analysis technique, is a cost‐efficient approach to analyzing and providing the basis for managing cultural challenges during SPI in a specific company. The process provides understanding and guidance in dealing with the specific challenges faced by software companies during SPI.

This paper explores the practical usage of insights on knowledge management (KM) to support innovation in a software organization. The organization has for some time engaged in software process improvement (SPI) initiatives to improve its operation. The paper applies two complementary approaches to KM, the codified and the personalized, to evaluate current KM practices and to improve its SPI practices. Based on the insights from the case we review key principles within SPI and evaluate the applied KM approaches. We conclude that it is advisable for SPI efforts to explicitly address KM issues. Each software organization has to find its own balance between personalized and codified approaches, this balance needs to be dynamically adjusted as the organization matures, and the adopted KM approach should differentiate between different types of SPI services.

Software process improvement (SPI) is a knowledge activity that is critical to the excellence of information system development. This study observes two knowledge gaps in the quest for SPI success and proposes a research model that integrates existing knowledge antecedents to address these gaps. Based on organizational learning theory and the dynamic capability view, the proposed model consolidates a firm's absorptive capacity (AC), learning ability in terms of exploration and exploitation and knowledge sharing (KS), and it examines the contextual relationships among these knowledge antecedents on the path to SPI success.

A quantitative research design is implemented to examine the model with a sample of 138 SPI-certified organizations in Taiwan and Mainland China. The partial least squares (PLS) technique is used for the data analysis.

The results reveal the following findings. First, AC triggers the effect of exploration/exploitation on SPI success. Second, KS fosters exploitation but has an insignificant influence on exploration. Third, KS can promote AC, and it serves as the sourcing mechanism for all of the knowledge antecedents. Overall, an integrative set of knowledge learning routes is presented in guiding software firms on the way to SPI success.

In addition to identification of the two knowledge gaps, this study advances the authors’ understanding by comprehending the causal associations of the four knowledge antecedents on the way to SPI success.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the relationships among absorptive capacity (AC), organisational culture (OC), and software process improvement (SPI) implementation success based on capability maturity model integration (CMMI). Specifically, the aim of this study is to understand the roles of potential and realised AC in SPI success.

This study proposes a research model and examines the relations among firm AC, SPI success, and OC. The authors surveyed 56 Taiwanese firms that adopted the CMMI-based SPI programme and received official certification.

The findings indicate that potential and realised AC have significantly positive effects on SPI success. In particular, realized (AC) partially mediates the effects of potential AC on SPI success. Furthermore, the effects of potential and realised AC on SPI success are significantly moderated by the adhocracy and hierarchy OCs, respectively.

Given that the scope of this empirical study was limited to Taiwan, the findings might lack generalisability; however, this provides an opportunity for future research.

This is the first empirical study investigating the influence of AC on CMMI-based SPI success. The proposed research model also examines the moderating relationships of two types of OCs, namely adhocracy and hierarchy, on AC (potential and realized) and SPI success.

This study aims to present insights on the relationship between perceived software process improvement (PSPI) and information technology (IT)-enabled knowledge management (KM). Moreover, the study provides an understanding of the mediating effect of critical success factors (CSFs) for effective IT-enabled KM on the previously mentioned relationship.

The respondents in the study involved employees in the software engineering (SE) organizations in national capital region in India. The structured equation modeling technique carried out through IBM.SPSS.Amos.v21-EQUiNOX was used to develop and evaluate the proposed framework. The proposed hypothesis testing has been carried out by path analysis using SPSS process macro.

The findings of the empirical study reveal that a significant relationship exists between the variables under investigation. Moreover, it was observed that CSFs act as a mediator between PSPI and IT-enabled KM. The identified factors are associated with various aspects as managerial, infrastructure, financial, systems and processes for IT-enabled KM. IT acts as a moderator between KM and PSPI and facilitate the various phases of KM as knowledge creation, storage and retrieval, sharing and application of knowledge.

The present study introduces a framework for identifying and applying the CSFs that influence the KM initiatives for PSPI in an SE organization. The practitioners can use the CSFs for assessing the performance (strengths and weaknesses) in process of software development and KM practices. Researchers can use the resultant framework proposed in the empirical study for PSPI, IT-enabled KM, and in academia, the framework supports to organize the study of IT-enabled KM for PSPI.

The general comprehension of the relationship between IT-enabled KM and PSPI for Indian SE organizations is scarce in the literature. Following, the analysis expands the earlier research by exploring the mediating role of the CSFs and the moderating effect of IT for KM and PSPI relationship.

Reports from a systems development research tradition in which emphasis is put on relating research activities to practice and on establishing fruitful collaboration between groups of researchers and practitioners. Describes and evaluates a specific research project in which a large group of researchers and practitioners worked together to understand, support, and improve systems development practices in four organisations over a period of three years. Uses the case to reflect on the research goals, approaches, and results involved in this tradition for researching systems development practice. Proposes collaborative practice research as a way to organise and conduct research into systems development practice based on close collaboration between researchers and practitioners. Exemplifies the use of pluralist research methodology by combining action research with experiments and conventional practice studies. Argues that collaborative practice research offers one practical way to strike a useful balance between relevance and rigour. Concludes with a discussion of the implications for the relation between research and practice within the systems development discipline and with lessons on how to design research efforts as collaborations between researchers and practitioners.

Requirements engineering (RE) and process improvement has been identified as one of the key factors for improving software quality. Despite this, little scholarly work has been done on developing ways to improve the RE process. The situation of RE and process improvement is even worse in small and medium enterprises that produce software. Consequently, the quality of software being produced by these companies has kept deteriorating. The purpose of this paper is to design a framework that will help small and medium software companies improve their RE processes in order to compete favorably with larger software companies, more especially in terms of software quality.

A qualitative research approach was adapted. Four software companies in Uganda were purposively selected to participate in the study. Data were collected using questionnaires. The requirements for designing the framework were gathered and refined from both primary and secondary data.

The key requirements for process improvement in small and medium software companies were identified as user involvement, use of evolutionary requirements engineering process improvement (REPI) strategy, change management, training and education, management support and commitment.

The designed framework was validated to ensure that it can be applied in RE and process improvement in small and medium software companies. Validation results show that the proposed framework is applicable and can be used to improve RE and process improvement in small and medium software companies.

The paper presents an improvement of the systematic approach to REPI by Kabaale and Nabukenya which is decomposed for easy understanding by non-technical readers and users.