A longitudinal study of software process management in Taiwan`s top companies

Abstract

Managing the software development process has been an important issue in the IT field. Since the mid-1980s, the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) has been exploring effective ways of managing the software development process. In 1987, SEI proposed a software process maturity framework (Humphrey & Sweet, 1987). Later in 1991, it further announced the capability maturity model (CMM) (Paulk et al. , 1991). Since then, there has been a rapidly growing number of software organizations adopting the CMM as a framework for internal improvement initiatives, including commercial organizations. This study surveys the IT organizations of the top 1000 business companies in Taiwan. It explores the status of software process management (SPM) in these companies and compares the findings with a similar study done in 1996. It further compares the SPM status with Japanese and US data reported in the literature. Finally, it identifies the weaknesses of the surveyed companies and recommends corrective actions for improving their software processes.stated explicitly. This includes the importance of TVM in the Product Development Process, which include the management of time and quality by reducing the overall process cycle. Total quality management is a major part of TVM, which assists in the accomplishment of the tasks of TVM. The concept of accuracy is one of the most important strategies that management can introduce into a shipyard to improve competitiveness. An introduction to the concept of "Zero Defects` versus "Construction Tolerance` is given in this paper. This paper also includes the detailed study of the implementation of TQM in the shipbuilding process with the examples of European and Korean shipyards. Knowledge of these examples reveals the importance of TQM in the shipbuilding process.