Applying Six Sigma in the Field of Software Engineering

Abstract

Process improvement in software engineering typically means introducing best practices. However, with increasing maturity of software engineering organizations the focus shifts from introducing industry best practices to optimizing the already implemented procedures and tools. But while in the field of software engineering a lot of best practice material exists, there is no proven and concise methodology for effective optimization.

The situation is similar to the one in the field of manufacturing some decades ago. They created Six Sigma, which is a problem solving and optimization methodology that is widely used today. But there are crucial differences between the disciplines manufacturing and software engineering. Whereas soft-ware artifacts are never developed twice and software processes are executed by humans, manufacturing is mostly machinery driven and usually deals with high quantities of identical output.

We applied Six Sigma in the field of software engineering and obtained promising results.