Page 41 - DCAP405_SOFTWARE_ENGINEERING

Software Engineering

Notes
The next step for company X will be an internal discussion of these results, and to start a
process to suggest alternative SPI actions to start with. This job is a bit difficult at the
moment because company X is in the middle of a rearrangement.

The result of the last section of the questionnaire was also of great interest. The most
important arguments in favour of SPI in the firmware-group were: Quality, motivation/
employee participation, and job satisfaction. The most important arguments against SPI
were: “This only creates new procedures and rules” and “a waste of recourses (bad
priority).”
The most important factors for ensuring successful process improvement in the firmware-
group were: Motivation, developer/designer in focus, and management involvement

Discussion of the Cases
These cases are from two quite different companies; Y, a pure software company and X, a
combined software and hardware company with their own production. They both had the
same method to follow, but the accomplishment was quite different in a lot of areas. The
objectives of the assessment was much the same.
Company Y did not work on the questionnaire template, and let the researchers perform
the assessment. The questionnaire was therefore not as tailor-made as one would expect.
The reason for this was, as explained before, the wish for only external input to the
assessment. If this way of conducting the assessment is successful or not is too early to
conclude.

On the other hand, company X did a lot of adjustments and therefore developed a highly
tailor-made questionnaire. The problem with this case was the lack of involvement from
the researcher’s side. To many questions were produced without removing any from the
template. Too many questions were too similar, and there were problems interpreting
some of them.
With this situation in mind, one could expect that there would be a great discussion on the
result from the tailor-made questionnaire, and less discussion on the result from the
standard questionnaire. It was a big surprise that the opposite occurred. There could be a
lot of reasons for this: At company X over 20 persons participated in the discussion, at Y
there were only 10 persons. Also, the participants at X were a mixture of managers and
developers, and there is a possibility that this prevented people from speaking out.

Another distinction between the two companies is the composition of the groups that
participated in the assessment. In company Y, the group was homogenous (only process
managers), but in company X there were three different groups. In this kind of assessment,
the results are more interesting if there is a large group answering the questions, and if
they come from different parts of the companies. This was the case at company X.
Comparing data from different groups and between different members of the same group
gave interesting results. For example did Project manager have the opinion that the level
in “Current strength” (topic: “making fast design changes”) was low and that one should
improve this area significantly. The developers had the opposite opinion. They meant the
level today was too high, and wanted to decrease it. People from the customers group
thought the level was OK.

The results from the discussions had very little in common. The results from the fourth
section of the questionnaire had more in common. Under the category “The most important
arguments in favour of SPI”, the results tell us that both companies think that SPI activities

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