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Software Process Improvement (SPI) programs have been implemented, inter alia, to improve quality and speed of software development. SPI addresses many aspects ranging from individual developer skills to entire organizations. It comprises, for instance, the optimization of specific activities in the software lifecycle as well as the creation of organizational awareness and project culture. In the course of conducting a systematic mapping study on the state-of-the-art in SPI from a general perspective, we observed Software Quality Management (SQM) being of certain relevance in SPI programs. In this paper, we provide a detailed investigation of those papers from the overall systematic mapping study that were classified as addressing SPI in the context of SQM (including testing). From the main study’s result set, 92 papers were selected for an in-depth systematic review to study the contributions and to develop an initial picture of how these topics are addressed in SPI. Our findings show a fairly pragmatic contribution set in which different solutions are proposed, discussed, and evaluated. Among others, our findings indicate a certain reluctance towards standard quality or (test) maturity models and a strong focus on custom review, testing, and documentation techniques, whereas a set of five selected improvement measures is almost equally addressed.
Software and system development faces numerous challenges of rapidly changing markets. To address such challenges, companies and projects design and adopt specific development approaches by combining well-structured comprehensive methods and flexible agile practices. Yet, the number of methods and practices is large, and available studies argue that the actual process composition is carried out in a fairly ad-hoc manner. The present paper reports on a survey on hybrid software development approaches. We study which approaches are used in practice, how different approaches are combined, and what contextual factors influence the use and combination of hybrid software development approaches. Our results from 69 study participants show a variety of development approaches used and combined in practice. We show that most combinations follow a pattern in which a traditional process model serves as framework in which several fine-grained (agile) practices are plugged in. We further show that hybrid software development approaches are independent from the company size and external triggers. We conclude that such approaches are the results of a natural process evolution, which is mainly driven by experience, learning, and pragmatism.
Software and system development faces numerous challenges of rapidly changing markets. To address such challenges, companies and projects design and adopt specific development approaches by combining well-structured methods and flexible agile practices. Yet, the number of methods and practices is large and the actual process composition is often carried out in an ad-hoc manner. This paper reports on a survey on hybrid software development approaches. We study which approaches are used in practice, how different approaches are combined, and what contextual factors influence the use and combination of hybrid software development approaches.