A Study of Software Process Improvement in Small and Medium Organizations

Presently, the majority of software development, including outsourcing, is carried out by small and medium size software development organizations all over the world. These organizations are not capable to bear the cost of implementing available software process improvement models like CMMI, SPICE, ISO, and so forth. Therefore, there is a need to address this problem. In this chapter, various software process assessment and software process improvement models for small and medium scale organizations are discussed and compared. This will lead towards development of standardized software process improvement model for small and medium sized software development organizations in the future. INTRODUCTION Quality models and standards have been developed to improve product quality. Software quality is defined as all characteristics of a product that bear on its ability to satisfy explicit and implicit needs of the user (ISO/IES 9126, 1991). According to Pressman (2002), software quality is defined as conformance to explicitly documented development standards and implicit characteristics that are expected of all professionally developed software. Therefore, this definition suggests three requirements for quality assurance that are to be met by the developer (Galin, 2004): Specific formal requirements, which refer • mainly to the outputs of the software system.