ADVANCED SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

Advanced Software Engineering

Advanced Software Engineering

Quality practices, process improvement

The path to quality software begins with excellent requirements. Slighting the processes of requirements development and management is a common cause of software project frustration and failure. This article describes ten common traps that software projects can encounter if team members and customers don't take requirements seriously.

In order to compete successfully in the domestic and international marketplace, today's organizations must deliver high quality products, services, and solutions within aggressive time and budget constraints. This requires a strong system of quality practices, good processes, talented people, and state-of-the-art technology.

Whether your business is developing high-tech systems, consumer software, or IT services, you want to ensure the highest quality product or service reaches your customer on time. Using CMMI-DEV as part of a process improvement program in your development organization can help you achieve on-time delivery and high quality, especially if your product or service relies heavily on software.

CMMI-DEV is used for process improvement in development organizations. CMMI-DEV is a model or collection of “best practices” that organizations follow to dramatically improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and quality of their product and service development work. CMMI-DEV also is supported by training courses and appraisal methodologies to help organizations objectively measure their improvement progress.

CMMI-DEV guidance covers the lifecycles of products and services from conception through delivery and maintenance. CMMI-DEV best practices are flexible enough to apply to a variety of industries, yet stable and consistent enough to provide a benchmark against which your organization can measure and compare itself.

Adopting CMMI-DEV is a solid, high-return investment that your organization can make to ensure long-term enduring results. The business benefits experienced by organizations using CMMI-DEV in their process improvement programs include the following:

Better customer satisfaction

Increased quality

More accurate schedules

Lower development costs

Substantial return on investment

Improved employee morale and reduced turnover

CMMI-DEV based process improvement includes identifying your organization's process strengths and weaknesses and making process changes to turn weaknesses into strengths. CMMI-DEV best practices and process improvement goals are organized into intuitive groups called “process areas.” Your organization chooses its path to excellence by focusing on the process areas most important to its business objectives.

Adopting CMMI-DEV for process improvement is a low-risk activity because you can count on significant and measurable benefits. CMMI-DEV best practices are not new business objectives to be achieved by your organization; instead CMMI-DEV provides a framework for accomplishing existing business objectives on time and on budget. CMMI-DEV based process improvement doesn't require special tools or exact approaches. The return on investment of such a program more than pays for the monetary investment required.

Proponents of each approach have sought to improve them as well as apply them for small, medium and large gains. Simple one is Process Approach, which forms the basis of ISO 9001:2008 Quality Management System standard, duly driven from the 'Eight principles of Quality managagement', process approach being one of them. Thareja [2] writes about the mechanism and benefits: "The process (proficiency) may be limited in words, but not in its ...