Abstract
There has been much focus on the development process in the Software Process Improvement community. This paper describes software process improvement work done within a product division in a medium-sized Norwegian software company. The division has the main responsibility for the market activities, development, implementation, maintenance and support of their software products. We identified three main problem areas related to the overall process for management of the software product. None of the problem areas were directly concerned with the development process itself. The problem areas were addressed by the division’s management. Despite the lack of focus on the programmers and the development process, the programmers’ attitude changed into a more positive one. One reason might be that the new overall product handling process “protected” the programmers from the market activities, and also clarified responsibility for the core development and the maintenance development. This paper discusses the findings in the case-study, and concludes that maybe the best software process improvement initiative would be to simply leave the programmers alone.
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Westerheim, H., Frimann Koren, E. (2002). “Leave the Programmers Alone”- A Case Study. In: Oivo, M., Komi-Sirviö, S. (eds) Product Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2559. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36209-6_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36209-6_25
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