Estimates of the percentage of industrial process controllers with performance problems are surprisingly high – various studies indicate that anywhere from 66% to 80% of controllers are not performing as well as they should. These controllers can have a significant detrimental effect on plant profitability, both in increased product variance and increased reaction times. In addition, the regula...

In order to improve software maintenance processes, we first need to be able to characterize and assess them. These tasks must be performed in depth and with objectivity since the problems are complex. One approach is to set up a measurement-based software process improvement program specifically aimed at maintenance. However, establishing a measurement program requires that one understands the...

Clustering is mostly an unsupervised procedure and most of the clustering algorithms depend on assumptions and initial guesses in order to define the subgroups presented in a data set. As a consequence, in most applications the final clusters require some sort of evaluation. The evaluation procedure has to tackle difficult problems, which can be qualitatively expressed as: i. quality of cluster...

When assessing software engineering processes, current reference models approaches typically rely on manual techniques for acquiring evidence of practices, which is then correlated with expected model attributes to assess compliance. This is costly, error-prone, and assessment feedback is infrequent and detached from the original context. Automated data acquisition could improve this situation,...

In order to enhance their performance, many organizations have initiated change projects. However, management is reluctant to initiate them due to their enterprise-wide impact and costs that are higher than those of traditional system development projects. Thus, there is a need to assess the value of the redesigned process of a successfully implemented organizational change projects. The purpos...

The software industry is an important economic activity in industrial countries. Nowadays the investment in this field measured in millions of dollars, the IT organizations varies in their size and role. An area of concern to IT organizations is implementing and adopting Software Process Improvement (SPI) models. For many years, researchers have developed several SPI model, most of which like C...