Karol Frühauf (INFOGEM AG, Switzerland)

Not every change is for better. If you want to improve you better know where you are. You need to be aware of what does work – it would be a sin to change it – and what does not work –a change might be beneficial. Many organizations only recognize their pain and use painkillers without taking into account the adverse reactions in the healthy organs. It is the art of process assessment to provide the right diagnosis.

Either standards or maturity models are used as reference in assessments. There is an underlying assumption that these references define the state of the art and therefore an assessment using them provides a useful picture and hints what to keep as it is and where to change what. The development of such references and of the underlying models is a job with great responsibility. With reliable assessment results at hand we need 'only' to implement the improvements in the identified areas. The only problem is 'only'. Organizations have a great inertia, paradoxically, development organizations the greatest although they are working on innovations for others. Therefore, the topic of approaches used for process improvement and experience / insights gained is of prevalent interest. Half of the papers in this track cover this topic.

The contributions to this track cover the whole cycle from modeling via assessment till improvement. Models and approaches are covered as well as experience reports provided. A couple of papers are around the Brazilian Program for Software Process Improvement MPS.BR based on a model with the same name. Gleison Santos et. al. report the results of software improvement efforts in Brazilian software companies that use the MPS.BR model– a tale, not a fairy tale.

Another focus of the track is the improvement effort in small and medium enterprises (SME). Ian Allison investigates the organizational factors based on six case studies with small size teams. Gisele Villas Boas et. al. applied MPS.BR in SMEs and report about the approach they used. Timo Varkoi presents the new ISO/IEC Standard 29110 addressing process assessment in very small companies.

Some papers focus on a very special aspect. Luis Amaral and João Faria applied Gap Analysis Method to the Team Software Process. Andrea O.S. Barreto and Ana Regina Rocha analyzed similarities among software projects to devise a mechanism for software project monitoring process improvement. Ahilton Barreto et. al. adapted the family idea to software processes and use it to support software process definition at consulting organizations.

Two papers deal explicitly with human factors. Adriano Bessa Albuquerque and Shamya Ribeiro Gomes Morais describe a human resource management approach that worked in Brazilian software organizations. Guido Lubinski and Armin Oppitz observed clash of cultures in a multinational company and provide insights how to manoeuvre between carrier grade and the perpetual beta to master the cultural challenges.

A number of papers are devoted to applying theories and modelling. Clenio F. Salviano et. al. applied modeling theory to devise a method for tri-dimensional process assessment. Mariano Angel Montoni and Ana Regina Rocha applied grounded theory to analyze software process improvement implementations. Paula Ventura Martins and Alberto Rodrigues da Silva made a comparative study of process metamodel approaches and developed a new software process improvement metamodel.

• Chair - Karol Frühauf (INFOGEM)

• Local Co-Organizing Chair - André Ferreira (Univ. Minho)

• Andreas Nehfort (Nehfort IT-Consulting, Vienna, Austria)
• Arnold Scheuing (Mobiliar Versicherung, Bern, Switzerland)
• Eva Kisonova (Siemens, Bratislava, Slovakia)
• Finn Svendsen (PR electronics, Ronde, Denmark)
• Michael Steinhöfel-Córdova (SIX Telekurs, Zürich, Switzerland)
• Patricia Rodriguez-Dapena (SoftWcare S.L., Vigo, Spain)
• Péter Krauth (IQSOFT Intelligent Software, Budapest, Hungary)
• Ralf Kneuper (Beratung für Softwarequalitätsmanagement und Prozessverbesserung, Darmstadt, Germany)
• Robert Dankanin (STEST CZ, Prague, Czech Republic)
• Siegfried Zopf (Software Engineering & Qualitätsmanagement Zopf, Maria Anzbach, Austria)
• Walter Wintersteiger (Management & Informatik, Dornbirn, Austria)

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