Title: From Pragmatic to Systematic Software Process Improvement: An Evaluated Approach,
Abstract: Software processes improvement (SPI) is a challenging task, as many different
stakeholders, project settings, and contexts and goals need to be considered.
SPI projects are often operated in a complex and volatile environment and,
thus, require a sound management that is resource-intensive requiring many
stakeholders to contribute to the process assessment, analysis, design,
realisation, and deployment. Although there exist many valuable SPI approaches,
none address the needs of both process engineers and project managers. This
article presents an Artefact-based Software Process Improvement & Management
approach (ArSPI) that closes this gap. ArSPI was developed and tested across
several SPI projects in large organisations in Germany and Eastern Europe. The
approach further encompasses a template for initiating, performing, and
managing SPI projects by defining a set of 5 key artefacts and 24 support
artefacts. We present ArSPI and discus results of its validation indicating
ArSPI to be a helpful instrument to set up and steer SPI projects.