Efficiency of projects is a central concern in project management. Such concerns have only been exacerbated with projects being increasingly distributed across firm and country boundaries. This study has a two-fold research agenda: First, it provides an understanding of how the efficiency of projects varies across project organization types, namely, Insourcing, Outsourcing, Offshoring, and Offs...

Software development is a complex, knowledgeintensive, and innovative process that frequently takes place in an extremely competitive and highly uncertain environment. For a long time, software developers have used traditional-structured approaches that are more disciplined and focus on coordinated actions to ensure the software goals are met. Recently, this traditional way of software developm...

Test-Driven Development is a technique where each change to the observable behavior of a program is motivated by a failing test. High design quality is maintained by continuous small design improvements called refactorings. While some integrated development environments support automated refactoring, they do not handle problems that occur if refactorings are used in development teams or on publ...

There have been many studies and examples in the literature separately demonstrating the benefits of Agile software development and Software Configuration Management process to software development organizations. There is, however, a general misconception that these two practice domains cannot coexist in a single environment without compromising the values of each other, and there is little rep...

Risk is not always avoidable, but it is controllable. The aim of this paper is to present new techniques which use the stepwise regression analysis to model and evaluate the risks in planning software development and reducing risk with software process improvement. Top ten software risk factors in planning software development phase and thirty control factors were presented to respondents. This...

The past years have seen growing investments in the area of product lifecycle management (PLM) by the automotive sector. Due to its complex development cycle, the automotive OEM has begun to adopt the supplier integration into its product development process. To respond to this new trend, the PLM system needs to evolve to support the collaboration and partnership management between the automoti...

Software development is a complex activity. It is involved with different scenarios and risks which must be managed through a systematic approach to Software Risk Management (SRM). The best software process depends on the project’s particularities. Situational Method Engineering (SME) focuses on building project specific method/process according to the situation at hand. This paper proposes an ...

We present a refined version of a meta-model process modeling framework that can be effectively used to identify key practices to initiate and sustain a software process improvement effort focused on a single process area. Our approach moves away from the overall software development process and computation of maturity levels and focuses on a particular process area or task and its key practice...

Agile distributed environments pose particular challenges related to control of quality and collaboration in software development. Moreover, while face-to-face interaction is fundamental in agile development, distributed environments must rely extensively on mediated interactions. On this backdrop, we report from an in-depth case study of an agile distributed software project. Applying Kirsch’s...

Software development is an expanding activity. Responding to its needs efficiently, with quality and low cost demands an intense learning, to prevent the repetition of the same mistake twice. One way to meet this goal consists of capturing organization’s knowledge and makes it available to all their members through the use of knowledge management systems. In this paper, we discuss the importanc...