Product focused software process improvement (P-SPI) : concepts and their application

Management problems in the development of software have been addressed over recent years by a focus on improvement of the development process. This paper states that software process improvement (SPI) should have an explicit product focus. The practical implementation of a method for product-focused software process improvement is presented and discussed and experiences from a particular development project are described. The main conclusions are that a product focus addresses the specific needs of a company very well and results in early availability and visibility of benefits. As a result, commitment of a product development team to an improvement programme is established. Furthermore, it appears that the benefits of the application of the P-SPI method outweigh the (relatively low) cost already in an early phase of the project. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.