Page 42 - DCAP405_SOFTWARE_ENGINEERING

Unit 2: A Generic View of Process

Notes
will improve quality and make the employees more satisfied. SPI activities seem like a
necessary thing to do if you want to achieve success.
In the category “The most important arguments against SPI”, the companies had the same
opinion on SPI-work increasing the workload and as a source of new procedures and
rules, which will cost a lot of resources and move the focus away from the projects.
Comparing the results from these categories is interesting, because they first argue that
SPI is necessary for the company to survive, but there is a lot of negative work to be done
doing this. Maybe SPI has a problem with the association of “quality control”!

Under “The most important factors for ensuring successful process improvement”, the
companies had two factors in common: Employee participation and management
involvement.
During the presentation of the data, there were a lot of “expected” conclusions, but also
some the company had never thought about. The conclusions they had expected had,
however, never been externalized before. This happened for the first time as a result of the
assessments.

2.4 Summary

The main goal of software engineering is to help developers obtain high-quality software
at low cost and with a small time.

Software engineering approach pivots around the concept of process. A process means “a
particular method of doing something, generally involving a number of steps or
operations.”

In software engineering, the phrase software process refers to the method of developing
software.

The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) is a methodology used to develop and refine an
organization’s software development process.

2.5 Keywords

CAD: Computer Aided Design
CMM: Capability Maturity Model

DOD: Department of Defense
OOSP: Object-Oriented Software Process
SEI: Software Engineering Institute

SPC: Statistical Process Control
SPI: Software Process Improvement

2.6 Review Questions

1. Software Engineering can be viewed as a layered technology. Explain.
2. Why it is important that the process provides data that can be used to evaluate the current
process and its weaknesses.

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