Software Process Management: An Organizational Learning Perspective

We draw from the quality management and organizational learning literatures to develop a descriptive model of software process management. These literature streams suggest that the concepts of process design, process control, learning through experimentation and learning through knowledge codification and reuse are important in the development of process capability. We define each of these concepts as latent constructs, and then propose a descriptive model of software process management. The model was tested using data collected from 123 IS units in Fortune 1000 firms and large government agencies. Our empirical results suggest that process design efficacy and process control have a positive relationship with software process capability. Furthermore, both learning through experimentation and learning through knowledge codification and reuse enable the design of efficacious processes and facilitate the development of appropriate standards to control the development process. Implications of our findings for IS research and practice are discussed.