The use of an electronic process guide in a medium-sized software development company

For process models to be useful, more and more software companies not only tailor their process models to the specific needs of the company, but also make them available on the company's intranet. In this article, we try to understand what characterizes the use of an electronic process guide (EPG) among developers in a medium-sized software company. We describe the findings that emerged from a grounded theory study in which we interviewed 19 developers and project managers. We found that implementing an EPG is not a straightforward process, but that it depends on several organizational factors. Our findings suggest that the process guide should be anchored among the leaders, that users should be involved in creating and updating it and offered training and support during use, that efforts should be taken to keep the guide updated, that templates and checklists are seen as the most useful features, that integration with other tools make it more useful, and, finally, that it should be easy to tailor the process guide to different project types or activities. The insights gained from this study can be used as recommendations for other medium-sized software companies when implementing electronic process guides. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.