How does Quality of Formalized Software Processes Affect Adoption?

Defining software processes allows companies to evaluate and improve them enhancing development productivity and product quality, as well as allowing certification or evaluation. Formalizing processes also helps eliminating ambiguity, and enables tool support for evolution and automatic analysis. But these benefits cannot be fully achieved if practitioners do not adopt the process. Some challenges related to adoption have already been identified. In this paper we analyze the influence of the quality of the specified process on its adoption. Adoption is measured in terms of work products built during projects: work products that were not built, those that were built but late during the project, and those that were built in time. We illustrate this analysis by evaluating the adoption of a formalized process in a small Chilean company along five projects. We conclude that certain kinds of errors in process specification may threaten its adoption and thus its potential benefits.

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