Situated Assessment of Problems in Software Development

This paper reports on action research undertaken to understand and to improve the problems with software processes of a medium-sized Danish company. It is argued that, in order to understand what the specific problems are, we may, on the one hand, rely on normative process models like CMM or Bootstrap. On the other hand, we may also see the specific and unique features of software processes in a company through what we call "problem diagnosis." Problem diagnosis deals with ellciting problems perceived by software professionals and with forming commitment to enable software process improvement to effectively take place. A central purpose of problem diagnosis is to base the SPI project on the software developers' own perceptions of software process problems and suggestions for improvement rather than on the prescriptions and norms of a maturity model