Implementing a people focused SPI programme

Software Process Improvement (SPI) has become the most popular approach to delivering improvements to the software product. Based on statistical process control, the underlying theme is that by understanding and defining the current state of a company’s software development processes, quality practitioners and managers can sufficiently determine and control areas within the development process to achieve improvements in the product. We support this general approach to SPI. We also believe that the people factors in SPI implementation are vital. We believe that to achieve greater success in software process improvement initiatives, greater attention needs to be paid to the perspectives and attitudes of software practitioners. However, we believe that different groups of practitioners have different experiences and attitudes towards SPI. We present preliminary evidence from our study of UK companies. We present the obstacles and motivators to successful SPI from the perspective of three groups of practitioners: strategic management, operational management and grassroots level practitioners. We find that grassroots practitioners believe that SPI generates increased workload due to the amount of documentation required by current models. We also present evidence of positive influences and motivators to SPI that we have come across in companies. We find that giving practitioners ownership of the processes to be improved encourages them to be more responsive towards the improvement programme. We draw together the common issues in the study and argue that time, financial commitment and practitioner buy-in are critical to the success of SPI programmes.