Software Process Improvement at Abb - Common Issues and Lessons Learnt

The growing importance of software for products as well as processes has been recognised in several ABB companies. As a result they started initiatives to improve their software development. Unlike other improvement programmes in industry, ABB‘s software process improvement initiatives are not part of company-wide, globally controlled programme. They rather evolved locally in different ABB companies, coached and co-ordinated by ABB Corporate Research. This paper summarises the experiences gained in the various process improvement activities. Firstly it describes how ABB‘s software process improvement initiatives relate to similar ones in other companies, and how the foci of the improvement measures evolved over time. Secondly, we present the current status of the improvement initiatives, pointing out the role of ESSI funded process improvement experiments in this context. In the main part we describe obstacles to software process improvements, and the lessons we have learned. We summarise our experience in terms of ten theses that we consider necessary conditions for successful software process improvement programmes. The theses cover technical, organisational as well as human aspects.