This thesis is a study on improving the software requirements management processes of embedded software department of a company. The literature on software process improvement and requirements engineering is reviewed. After determining the problems related to the current requirements management processes of the department, an improved process is proposed addressing these problems. The static process descriptions and the models of the current and improved requirements management processes are formed. A recently proposed pre-enactment model for measuring process quality is used for measuring the quality of the current and improved requirements management processes. Finally, the results of the process quality measurements are compared and evaluated.

Reference models developed for software process improvement (SPI) provide guidelines about what to do while assessing and improving the processes, but they do not answer the questions of how. There have been a number of studies that try to find effective and strategic implementation models or to identify factors that affect the SPI success. However, these studies do not provide answers to questions about the effect of these factors on SPI program duration or accelerated SPI studies. This study aims to investigate the factors that affect CMMI-based SPI duration. It consists of two phases: in the first phase, factors that influence SPI success are identified and hypotheses related to these factors are formulated based on the case studies published in the literature. In the second phase of the study, hypotheses are revised based on the results of the qualitative research conducted in seven companies, six of which have obtained CMMI-Level 3 certification as a consequence of their SPI effort. The study has shown that management commitment and involvement as well as process documentation have had a significant shortening effect on CMMI-based SPI duration, within the context of the studied cases. Software process improvement / CMMI / Success factors / Duration factors. Enter specific words or phrases that are listed in thesis.

In spite of the fact that software reliability studies have attracted great deal of attention from different disciplines in 1970s, applications of the subject have rarely been involved in the software industry. With the rise of technological advances especially in the military electronics field, reliability of software systems gained importance. In this study, a company in the defense industries is inspected for their abilities and needs regarding software reliability, and an improvement proposal with metrics measurement system is formed. A computer tool is developed for the evaluation of the performance of the improvement proposal. Results obtained via this tool indicate improved abilities in the development of reliable software products.

This study investigates software development process improvement approaches. In particular, the static process evaluation methodology proposed by S. G&uuml / ceglioglu is applied on the requirements analysis and validation process applied in Project X in MYCOMPANY and an improved process is proposed. That methodology is an extension of the ISO/IEC 9126 approach for software quality assessment, and is based on evaluating a set of well-defined metrics on the static model of software development processes. The improved process proposed for Project X is evaluated using G&uuml / ceglioglu&rsquo / s methodology. The applied and improved process measurement results compared to determine if the improved process is successful or not.

This thesis focuses on measurement based software process improvement, especially improvement of requirements change management process. The literature on software measurement is investigated, software process improvement methodologies are studied and requirements change management metrics are examined. Requirements change management process at a private company working in the defense industry is observed and metrics obtained from various tools have been aggregated. Moreover, an improvement proposal, which also simplifies collecting metrics, is presented for the requirements change management process. A tool is developed for evaluating the performance of the improvement proposal using event driven simulation method.

Quality assurance activities, in software development, are the backbone of whole project. These activities are not only responsible of product quality, but also for process quality. In conventional software development QA is a separate group of QA experts. As the trends of software development moved towards agile development, QA activities also got changed. In agile development most of these activities are performed by developers. Close people collaboration, onsite customer and Test Driven Development are the approaches in agile development to achieve better product quality. In this thesis we have presented the philosophical as well as practical angle QA in agile development. Mindset of agile development revolves around product quality but there is much work to be done to impart quality of process in agile development to get it standardized and more organized. QA activities remain centric and focused to testing. Practices like SPI and following some standards are lacking in agile methodologies. In this thesis we have proposed to inject an extra layer of QA in agile projects. Purpose of injecting and extra layer, is to use the knowledge of QA experts to achieve quality in development process that will result in higher level of product quality.

Software Process Improvement initiatives have been implemented by many companies in order to achieve quality of products and practices. Many models like CMMI and IDEAL have been adopted as a means to gain competitive advantages among competitors and trustworthiness of customers. Although these models have proved successful results, the inherent characteristics of SMEs make it difficult and in many cases unfeasible to implement such models, without meaning that those companies are less capable of producing quality products or adopting well-defined practices. This research presents a model to guide Software Process Improvement (SPI) according to the context of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) using the Open Maturity Model (OMM) elaborated by the QualiPSo consortium. Different literature reviews, a survey and a focus group were done in order to build the theoretical foundations that support the structure of the proposed SPI model, validate the findings and evaluate the resulting SPI model. SPI in SMEs, CMMI implementations in SMEs, issues affecting SPI programs, and Knowledge Management approaches supporting improvement of software processes and practices are the four main pillars of the theoretical background supporting the design of the proposed SPI model, which is the major outcome of this thesis project and is aimed to guide SPI programs considering OMM assessment results. The proposed SPI model was subject of a preliminary evaluation with researchers and a validation with practitioners. The results have confirmed that SPI outcomes are more valuable when business requirements and SPI objectives are chosen to drive the improvement actions. The importance of organizational awareness and the value of knowledge management strategies to mitigate potential problems faced when implementing SPI has also been highlighted when evaluating the model.

Avoidable rework constitutes a large part of development projects, i.e. 20-80 percent depending on the maturity of the organization and the complexity of the products. High amounts of avoidable rework commonly occur when having many faults left to correct in late stages of a project. In fact, research studies indicate that the cost of rework could be decreased by up to 30-50 percent by finding more faults earlier. However, since larger software systems have an almost infinite number of usage scenarios, trying to find most faults early through for example formal specifications and extensive inspections is very time-consuming. Therefore, such an approach is not cost-effective in products that do not have extremely high quality requirements. For example, in market-driven development, time-to-market is at least as important as quality. Further, some areas such as hardware dependent aspects of a product might not be possible to verify early through for example code reviews or unit tests. Therefore, in such environments, rework reduction is primarily about finding faults earlier to the extent it is cost-effective, i.e. find the right faults in the right phase. Through a set of case studies at a department at Ericsson AB, this thesis investigates how to achieve early and cost-effective fault detection through improvements in the test process. The case studies include investigations on how to identify which improvements that are most beneficial to implement, possible solutions to the identified improvement areas, and approaches for how to follow-up implemented improvements. The contributions of the thesis include a framework for component-level test automation and test-driven development. Additionally, the thesis provides methods for how to use fault statistics for identifying and monitoring test process improvements. In particular, we present results from applying methods that can quantify unnecessary fault costs and pinpointing which phases and activities to focus improvements on in order to achieve earlier and more cost-effective fault detection. The goal of the methods is to make organizations strive towards finding the right fault in the right test phase, which commonly is in early test phases. The developed methods were also used for evaluating the results of implementing the above-mentioned test framework at Ericsson AB. Finally, the thesis demonstrates how the implementation of such improvements can be continuously monitored to obtain rapid feedback on the status of defined goals. This was achieved through enhancements of previously applied fault analysis methods. / Avhandlingen handlar om hur en mjukvaruutvecklingsorganisation kan hitta fel tidigare i utvecklingsprocessen. Fokus ligger på att hitta rätt fel i rätt fas, d.v.s. när det är som mest kostnadseffektivt. Avhandlingen presenterar en samling fallstudier utförda inom detta området på Ericsson AB. Nyckelord: processförbättring, felanalys, tidig feldetektering

Abstract Software has become an important part of our everyday life in the form of various information processing intensive products and services. The number of companies producing software has risen considerably and at the same time competition between software businesses has greatly intensified. During the last decades software process improvement (SPI) has been recognized as a usable possibility to increase the quality of software development. Implemented SPI investments have often indicated increased process capabilities as well. Recently more attention has been focused on the costs of SPI as well as on the cost-effectiveness and productivity of software development, although the roots of economic-driven software engineering originate from the very early days of software engineering research. This research tries to advance the concepts, principles and practical methods of economic-driven software engineering by associating them with SPI concepts, theories and software process assessment methods, in particular, capability-maturity -based assessment methods. This is done in part by presenting an analysis of the economic-driven view of software development and in part by discussing the SPI context and cost-efficiency characteristics. As a result of this analysis work, a value-based approach is adopted in the study, involving definition of the essential concepts of value, cost and worth in software development. These definitions originate from the Value Engineering (VE) method, originally applied and developed for the needs of the production industry. Therefore, for the purposes of this study these concepts are firstly justified and secondly defined. In order to study and evaluate the value-based approach, a method called value assessment is developed and later on also combined with capability-maturity -based assessment and called the Value Enhanced Assessment (VEA) method. The combination is seen to respond even better to the overall challenges of software development and SPI. Although VEA is used here only for research purposes, it is a rational outcome of the value-based approach and developed in the context of the BOOTSRAP software process assessment method. The results show that even though there is still much to do in making the economic-driven view complete in software engineering, the value-based approach outlines a way towards a more comprehensive understanding of it. In addition, value-based methods are most likely to be needed to complete existing capability-maturity -based assessment methods, such as BOOTSTRAP.

Abstract The quality of a software product depends largely on the quality of the process that is used to develop it. In small software companies, the development process may be informal or even ad hoc, which causes uncertainty and variation in the product quality. However, quality issues are as important in small companies as in their larger counterparts. To sustain their dynamics and competitiveness, small organizations need to concentrate on the most effective quality assurance methods. Software inspection is a proven method for improving product quality and it provides a very cost-effective way for small companies to improve their development processes. This study introduces a framework for adjusting the inspection process for the organization's specific needs and evaluating its capabilities. The main focus of this work, however, is on refining and improving the inspection process. The improvement is guided by concrete instructions that are documented as process patterns. The pattern approach has already been used successfully in several other areas of software engineering. Patterns aim at capturing the best practices of software development and transferring this knowledge between people or organizations. The framework for inspection process capability originates from the literature relating to different types of peer review methods and experiments with flexible and tool-supported inspections in small companies. Furthermore, generic process improvement models are studied to find a feasible structure for the framework. As a result of the analysis, the i3 capability model is introduced. The feasibility of the model has been investigated in real-life software organizations carrying out inspections. After the capability evaluation, the inspection process can be upgraded with the aid of improvement patterns, which provide structured and easy-to-follow guidelines for implementing improvements. An initial list of patterns, describing solutions to the most common problems confronted in the establishment of inspections, is extracted from related inspection research and an industrial experiment. The contributions of this study are, first, the new view of the inspection process, based on the fundamental activities that are performed during an inspection instead of a series of stages, as it is usually presented. An activity-based process description enables tailoring of the process for organization-specific needs and its targeted improvement. Second, the study introduces a practical, lightweight method for implementing the improvement. Patterns are especially suitable in companies where resources are limited and full-scale improvement programmes cannot be initiated. Furthermore, the generic process improvement models do not provide detailed information on how improvements should be carried out, and the pattern approach represents a promising method for that. Third, the inspection process currently does not have a very significant role in generic software process improvement models; this study helps in outlining the importance of inspections. A similar approach could be applied to other software subprocesses to enable their evaluation and improvement.