The Adoption of Software Process Improvement in Saudi Arabian Small and Medium Size Software Organizations: an Exploratory Study

Quite a lot of attention has been paid in the literature on “how to adopt” software process improvement (SPI) in Small and Medium Size (SME) software organization in several countries. This has resulted in limited improvements to the software industry and impacted the Saudi’s economy. However, the SPI adoption is one of the major issues in the domain of small and medium size software organization, especially in developing countries. The objective of this study is to investigate the current state of SPI adoption in Saudi Arabia in comparison to those of the standard models used internationally which could help in improving the software quality and have an impact on Saudi Arabian economy. After examining a number of studies in the literature, we have designed a questionnaire to survey SME software organizations in Saudi Arabia. First, we conducted a pilot study with 24 senior managers to access the intended survey and further improve the process. Then, we sent out 480 questionnaires to the participants and received 291 responses. The most interesting part of this result is that the respondents highlighted the benefits of using SPI standard; whereby, when asked about the reason for not using SPI, 64% of the respondents agree that the usage of SPI standard is time consuming and 55% agree that there is a difficulty in understanding the SPI standard. Keywords—Software process improvement; software organization; software adoption; small and medium enterprises (SME)