Improvement Steps



The first step of the company in this direction was the definition of the software development process model, called SIMEP (Software Integrated Management and Engineering Process), founded on the following basic principles: iterative incremental/evolutionary approach, software reuse, object-oriented approach, full integration of project management and software engineering activities.
The improvement steps followed selected improvement areas based on the Key Process Areas of the CMM. For each improvement area, a set of guidelines and a templates have been defined, in order to make homogeneous the way of performing the various activities among different projects during the software life-cycle.

The topic of requirements management has been faced in order to obtain a homogeneous classification and description of the product requirements, and the management of the status and of the attributes of each single requirement is currently guaranteed.

Also as regarding the project management, two improvement degrees have been obtained in two different, subsequent steps: at first the effort has been spent into the definition of common process and instruments for planning and controlling the projects; a subsequent improvement followed, aimed to support the project managers in sharing the planning and monitoring company experience and in managing the project risks.

Configuration management activities have been defined and supported for making the software products and intermediate artifacts managed and controlled.
The verification and validation of the products has been guaranteed by making reviews of process artifacts and software test performed by adopting standard process and method, and by defining the classification and weight of the defects.
Guidelines for process tailoring have been produced for supporting the process scalability: the process is currently adaptable to various project and product types, sizes and risk classes.
Data measurement and metrics constituted an important topic to be investigated; a set of guidelines has been defined and then made more usable by the creation of a software process database for an homogeneous collection of data and measures; the company projects data have made available to be used for estimation activities.

These important improvement activities strongly connected to the Key Process Areas of the CMM have been completed by a set of other improvement steps, related for example to the selection of particular tools or methods to support and perform the development activities.

After the assessment to the Level 3 of the CMM, most effort has been spent in the improvement of the standard set of company tools, and in introducing smooth changes to the company processes towards the Level 4 of CMM.

Improvement Steps
Company Context
 Organizational problems faced