Software Process Improvement Minitrack Introduction 31st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

The topic of Software Process Improvement continues to attract the interest of a growing number of academic researchers and practitioners. Academic researchers are finding many opportunities to construct empirical research programs around the concepts, models, and techniques related to software process improvement efforts. Practitioners appear eager to participate in these programs as they search for methodologies, tools, and techniques that they can apply in practical ways. The papers in this minitrack address both theoretical and practical applications of Software Process Improvement. They focus on the development of models and tools that have practical application in an increasingly complex and competitive software development environment. All of the papers in this minitrack present original research results that advance current thinking on how software development can be improved. In addition, all of these papers provide rich and healthy starting points for further research in their respective topics. "In Search of Theory and Tools to Support Code Inspections" by Rodgers, Vogel, Purdin and Saints proposes a research agenda and tool development methodology to support software code inspections. This paper is based on the premise that a practical, people-oriented, and cognitively-based code inspection research approach provides many opportunities for both theoretical and practical research. By linking tasks, technology, and levels of process maturity the authors are able to propose a theoretical causal model that can enable management to better allocate resources to the code inspection process. "A WWW-Based Tool for Software Inspection" by Harjumaa and Tervonen also focuses on the area of software inspections. The authors note that although software inspections have proven effective in detecting defects, they may be logistically difficult for geographically