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This book constitutes the refereed research proceeding of the 14th European Software Process Improvement Conference, EuroSPI 2007, held in Potsdam, Germany in September 2007. The 18 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 60 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on agile methods, software process improvement studies, improvement methods, engineering and development, and quality and knowledge concepts.

RUP is a comprehensive software development process framework that has gained a lot of interest by the industry. One major challenge of taking RUP into use is to tailor it to specific needs and then to introduce it into a development organization. This study presents a review and a systematic assembly of existing studies on the tailoring and introduction of RUP. From a systematic search for study reports on this topic we found that most research is anecdotal and focus on the effects of RUP itself. Only a few number of studies address tailoring and introduction. We have found that tailoring RUP is a considerable challenge by itself and that it must be closely related to existing best practices. We see a tendency of turning from large complete process frameworks towards smaller and more light-weight processes which may impose a smoother transition from process model to process in use.

An essential characteristic of mature software and system development organizations is the definition and use of explicit process models. For a number of reasons, it can be valuable to produce new process models by tailoring existing process standards (such as the V-Modell XT). Both process models and standards evolve over time in order to integrate improvements or adapt the process models to context changes. An important challenge for a process engineering team is to keep tailored process models aligned over time with the standards originally used to produce them. This article presents an approach that supports the alignment of process standards evolving in parallel to derived process models, using an actual industrial example to illustrate the problems and potential solutions. We present and discuss the results of a quantitative analysis done to determine whether a strongly tailored model can still be aligned with its parent standard and to assess the potential cost of such an alignment. We close the paper with conclusions and outlook.

This paper summarizes multifaceted synergies discovered between the ISO/IEC 15408 (Common Criteria) IT Security Evaluation standard, software product quality evaluation standards and the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI). In addition to serving research motivated interest, the usefulness of the synergies is demonstrated through case studies related to significant systems development projects.

This paper aims to obtain a baseline snapshot of Project Management processes using a two-phase questionnaire to identify both performed and non-performed practices. The proposed questionnaire is based on the Level 2 process areas of the Capability Maturity Model Integration for Development v1.2. It is expected that the application of the questionnaire to the processes will help small and medium software enterprises to identify those practices which are performed but not documented, which practices need more attention, and which are not implemented due to bad management or unawareness.

In this article, we present a categorization of CMMI Specific Practices, and use this to reanalyze prior work describing the perceived value of those practices for Small-to-Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), in order to better understand the software engineering practice needs of SMEs. Our categorization is based not on process areas, but on outcome areas (covering organizational, process, project, and product outcomes) and on the nature of activities leading to outcomes in those areas (covering planning, doing, checking, and improvement activities). Our reanalysis of the perceived value of Specific Practices for the CMMI Level 2 Process Areas shows that SMEs most value practices for working on project-related outcomes, and for planning and doing work on product-related outcomes. Our categorization of practices will serve as a framework for further study about CMMI and other SPI approaches.

In small growing software companies, it is important to pay attention to software process improvement (SPI) in order to be successful and competitive in both domestic and foreign markets. However, limited resources and lack of knowledge about process culture may hinder the improvement efforts in small companies. In this paper, we present development activities done in a small growing software company in order to establish basis for SPI. Familiarizing to processes and SPI is done by modeling company’s processes using a lightweight software process modeling technique. The modeling combined with external consulting provides the company with capability to visualize their processes and to identify the problems in the processes. The improvement activities have been triggered by pointing out the problems. In the presented case, the company has independently implemented quite significant improvements for identified problems by acquiring needed knowledge and by implementing new tools to support workflows.

Software process improvement (SPI) models can be difficult to understand, principally because they lack visual representations relating concepts to text. Some models do not provide guidelines to help us understand their properties: i.e., their modular structure, the control-regulation configuration of common features in a key process area, and the arrangement of key process areas at each level. We propose Systems Modular Analysis (SMA) as a graphical modelling approach to facilitate understanding of SPI models. Using SMA, we reveal the internal structure of a key process area (KPA) in CMM-SW as a non-redundant configuration of common features. When the Level 2 KPAs of CMM-SW are modelled using SMA, a normative structure which shows a modular and recursive arrangement of process areas is obtained. We conduct an experiment to show how SMA helps in understanding CMM-SW. We conclude that SMA significantly improves understanding of the properties and structure of CMM-SW Level 2.

Organizing improvement work is a decision that is often made in vain. There is no standardized way to do things that works for every improvement effort. A more contingent approach is needed. Experience from seven years of improvement work at SimCorp shows that different types of improvement work requires different ways of organizing. We identify five ways of organizing for five types of improvement work. We use 9 case studies from SimCorp to show how they fit together. The resulting framework can be used to find a suitable way of organizing for a given type of improvement work.

Web application development is under certain circumstances such as a strong emphasis on time-to-market characterised by the usage of informal and ad-hoc development practices and a lot of tacit knowledge. Here we present an experiment that has been carried out in order to evaluate a recently proposed release planning method for web application development. This method aims at bringing stakeholders together to share knowledge and to decide on a configuration for the next release that satisfies all stakeholders. The method has been evaluated in terms of its effect on factors such as knowledge sharing, understanding, support to reach a consensus and stakeholders satisfaction.