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Process improvement approaches fertilised by advances in SPI

2015; Wiley; Volume: 27; Issue: 8 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/smr.1725

2047-7481

Miklós Bíró, Richard Messnarz, Ricardo Colomo‐Palacios,

Green IT and Sustainability

A typical characterisation of EuroSPI was stated by a company using the following words:'… the biggest value of EuroSPI lies in its function as a European knowledge and experience exchange mechanism for SPI and innovation'. EuroSPI2 2014 was held 25–27 June 2014 at Public Research Centre Henri Tudor, Luxembourg. In 2014, EuroSPI2 continued with the open workshop communities aligned with the conference and focusing on specific SPI topics. This included, in 2014, the communities for creating environments supporting innovation and improvement, SPI and product-system-software design, SPICE assessors exchanging experiences about high maturity organisations, SPI and measurement, and SPI and business process innovation. The EuroSPI2 2014 program had five international workshops on day 1, international key notes on days 2 and 3, more than 60 presentations from leading industry and leading research institutes, and a joint paper award with the American Society of Quality. Among the 26 countries represented at EuroSPI2 2014, the contributions were highly relevant for the European and world-wide industry also appearing in this special issue. The SPI Manifesto, launched in 2009, created a future vision, the extension of SPI to the systems and product level, which led to the involvement of major European manufacturing firms, the building of workshop communities for specific topics creating further networking opportunities, and contributions including good practices about how to achieve the advances. Systems, software, and services process improvement is meanwhile a major learning and success factor world-wide for staying competitive on a global and dynamically developing world market. In 2014, the Public Research Centre Henri Tudor collaborated with this board to coordinate EuroSPI2 2014. Since its beginning in 1994 in Dublin, the EuroSPI2 initiative outlines that there is no single silver bullet to solve SPI issues, but you need to understand a combination of different SPI methods and approaches to achieve real benefits. Therefore, each proceeding covers a variety of different topics, and at the conference, we discuss potential synergies and the combined use of such methods and approaches. In previous works, Biró, Messnarz and Colomo-Palacios 1 performed a review on the twenty years of publications of EuroSPI community. The papers selected for this special issue give a snapshot of the way ideas and approaches originally developed for software process improvement can practically fertilise improvement in related domains. They reflect EuroSPI2's multi-dimensional approach with the three fundamental components of process improvement known to be people and skills, process, and technology. The paper 'Identifying correlations of findings for building process improvement packages using graph clustering' by Choi, Kim, and Park is devoted to software process improvement (SPI), one of the cornerstones of the EuroSPI community. Authors present in this paper a graph-based approach for identifying correlations of findings and grouping them into improvement packages in an SPI project. SPI is at the heart of the EuroSPI community, and as a result, initiatives as the SPI Manifesto 2 (a lean introduction to the initiative can be found in the work of 3) emerged from the community back in 2009 as one of its important outcomes. The initiative is present in several papers on various aspects, including certification schemes 4 and social responsibility 5, citing two of the most important and recent cases. Apart from SPI Manifesto contents, SPI initiatives are prevalent in EuroSPI publication outputs, including papers on CMMI and Scrum 6, practical cases on SPI implementation 7, or team dynamics issues 8. In the paper 'ITIL in small to medium-sized enterprises software companies: towards an implementation sequence' by Lema et al., the authors present a suggestion on ITIL implementation sequence on small entities. Service management and improvement is one of the pillars of the EuroSPI community too. Not in vain, it is important to note that, since 2012, the EuroSPI2 initiative became 'European System, Software & Service Process Improvement & Innovation' adding Service to its name 9, 10. Information technology (IT) service improvement and IT governance are also quite popular in the community resulting in papers on IT service catalogue management 11, governance of cloud computing services 12, integration of governance and service management in IT scenarios 13, or IT service information management framework implementation 14. 'Experience with teaching and applying Process Appraisals at a University' by De Man deals with SPI education for small companies. The topic of SPI implementations is widespread in the community including papers on evaluation and control 15, information security aspects 16, and the ISO/IEC 29110: Systems and Software Life Cycle Profiles and Guidelines for Very Small Entities (VSEs) 17-20. However, educational factors beyond certification schemes have not been addressed by the community in an extensive way. To deal with these special issues, the International Workshop on Software Process Education, Training and Professionalism will take place in Gothenburg for the first time in 2015. The paper 'ECQA Governance SPICE Assessor Skills for Evaluating Integrated Risk Management Scenarios' by Ivanyos and Sándor-Kriszt deals, on the one hand with one of the European Certification and Qualification Association ECQA certification schemes, on the other with risk management scenarios. Focusing on the first aspect, the ECQA is a not-for-profit association that aims to unify the certification processes for various professions, including 30 job roles in its portfolio. Papers around this initiative include certifications such as the SPI Manager 4, Social Media Networker 21, Social Responsibility Manager 22, and Business Process Manager 23. The paper 'Towards Relating Delivery Methods and Examination Success: Lessons Learned from the VALO LLP Project Case Study' by Rahanu et al. is also presenting an effort on the ECQA certification schema, this time devoted to project valorisation. 'Development of MDevSPICE® - the Medical Device Software Process Assessment Framework' by Lepmets et al. is presenting the integration of medical standards and guidance documents with software development best practices. Software development in the medical domain is one of the hot topics in the community including lifecycle models 24, process communication 25, and traceability assessment 26 citing the most relevant and recent cases. The paper 'Choosing change strategy for ISO/IEC 33014' by Pries-Heje and Johansen is dealing with specific aspects of ISO/IEC TR 33014:2013 that is aimed to provide guidance on using process assessment as part of a complete framework and method for performing process improvement as part of a continual improvement activity. The seed of this standard is the ImprovAbility™ model 27. The impact of this initiative in the literature is growing 28. This paper contributes to increasing the diffusion of the important initiative. In the paper 'Where does all this waste come from?', Raschke et al. present a conceptual model on waste creation in software development projects following agile scenarios. The combination of agile methods and SPI approaches has tradition in the community where one of the important initiatives is related to agile maturity models 29. The paper entitled 'Assessing Traceability – Practical Experiences and Lessons Learned' is authored by Regan et al. In this case, traceability is also one of the topics previously covered by EuroSPI authors, including efforts on requirements for traceability 24 and traceability assessment methods 26, citing just two of the most recent examples. In summary, this special issue is conceived as a continuation of the efforts performed in the last 20 years by the EuroSPI community, providing new deltas in research and dissemination to the central research topics or the initiative. The editors would like to express their thanks to the members of the EuroSPI2 2014 Industrial Programme Committee for their contribution to the review and selection of the papers: Bæk Jørgensen, Jens, Mjølner Informatics A/S, Denmark; Baer, Cristina, Continental Engineering Services, Germany; Breske, Eva, Robert Bosch GmbH, Germany; Daughtrey, Tazewell, James Madison University, USA; Dekkers, Carol, Quality Plus Technologies, USA; Dussa-Zieger, Klaudia, Method Park Software AG, Germany; Ekert, Damjan, ISCN GmbH, Austria; Fehrer, Detlef, SICK AG, Germany; Forselius, Pekka, 4SUM Partners, Finland; Hagenmeyer, Philipp, ZF Friedrichshafen AG, Germany; Hallikas, Jarmo, Falcon Leader Oy, Finland; Hällmayer, Frank, Software Factory GmbH, Germany; Ivanyos, Janos, Trusted Business Partners Kft, Hungary; Johansen, Jørn, DELTA Axiom, Denmark; Johansson, Mika, FiSMA, Finland; König, Frank, ZF Friedrichshafen AG, Germany; Messnarz, Richard, ISCN Ltd, Austria/Ireland; Nevalainen, Risto, FiSMA, Finland; Poth, Alexander, Volkswagen AG, Germany; Renault, Samuel, Centre de Recherche Public Henri Tudor, Luxembourg; Sauberer, Gabriele, TermNet, Austria; Schweigert, Tomas, SQS Software Quality Systems AG, Germany; Sechser, Bernhard, Method Park, Germany; Spork, Gunther, Magna Powertrain, Austria; Stefanova-Pavlova, Maria, Center for Innovation and Technology Transfer-Global, Bulgaria; Von Bronk, Peter, Systemberatung Software-Qualität, Germany; Wegner, Thomas, ZF Friedrichshafen AG, Germany. Some contributions published in this volume have been funded with support from the European Commission. In this case, the publications reflect the views only of the author(s), and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein. In 2014, the ECQA community, represented in the papers of this special issue as well, joined the EuroSPI conference. At EuroSPI2 2014, it was announced that the conference series is renamed to EuroAsiaSPI to highlight the closer collaboration of Asian countries with Europe. For the first time in 2015, EuroSPI will be organised in an Asian location, in Turkey. In the future, it is planned to closer collaborate with Turkey, Japan, China, Korea, India, and further Asian countries becoming part of the EuroSPI community. EuroSPI has an agreement with the American Society of Quality (software division) to jointly issue an annual award for the best paper, which is planned to be published in the Wiley Journal of Software: Evolution and Process selection. All this means that EuroSPI continues to grow, will be sustained for further years, and will develop more SPI stories, which can be successfully published in collaboration with Wiley.