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Snapshot of industrial experiences shared at the 20th anniversary EuroSPI conference

2014; Wiley; Volume: 26; Issue: 9 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/smr.1677

2047-7481

Miklós Bíró, Richard Messnarz, Ricardo Colomo‐Palacios,

Digital Transformation in Industry

A typical characterization 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’. EuroSPI22013 was held in Dundalk Institute of Technology, Ireland. In 2013, EuroSPI2 continued with the open workshop communities aligned with the conference and focusing on specific SPI topics. This included in 2013 the communities for Creating Environments Supporting Innovation and Improvement, SPI and Product-System-Software Design, SPICE Assessors Exchanging Experiences across Assessment Models, and SPI and Measurement. The EuroSPI 2013 program had four international workshops on day 1, and on the conference days 2 and 3 international key notes, more than 60 presentations from leading industry and leading research institutes, and a joint paper award with the American Society of Quality. EuroSPI 2013 also hosted a fourth conference day to celebrate 20 years of EuroSPI, which included a set of key notes to think about the next 20 years of SPI in the future. These anniversary key notes have been videotaped and are available online. Among the 26 countries represented at EuroSPI22013, the contributions were highly relevant for the European and worldwide industry also appearing in this special issue. The SPI manifesto from 2009 created a future vision, the extension of SPI to the systems and product level led to involvement of major European manufacturing firms, the building of workshop communities for specific topics created further networking opportunities, and the contributions included good practices about how to achieve that. Systems, software, and services process Improvement is meanwhile a major learning and success factor worldwide for staying competitive on a global and dynamically developing world market. In 2013, Dundalk Institute of Technology collaborated with this board to coordinate EuroSPI22013. The value of this selection of papers lies in the fact that they present actual industrial experiences. Research-oriented EuroSPI22013 papers were published in separate proceedings. 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. This proceeding contains a selection of industrial experience papers leveraging SPI in various application domains, which 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 by Filipe Albero Pomar, José Antonio Calvo-Manzano, Edgar Caballero, and Magdalena Arcilla-Cobián contributes to the improvement of our understanding of the software development process by presenting a thorough approach to identifying the root causes of issues arising in the context of Scrum implementations. Paraic Hegarty, Eoghan O'Leary, Danny Dineen, David Bustard, and Adrian Moore address the issue of the transition from an initial product developed for a specific commission to a software product line supporting curriculum management in higher education. The paper describes the experiences and identifies the general lessons learned. The exploitation of the shift from traditional knowledge management to networked knowledge sharing in information technology including the software industry is addressed by Ricardo Colomo-Palacios, Richard Messnarz, Kerstin Siakas, Daniel Palosi, and Darragh Coakley. The paper gives account among others of a newly available job role qualification program contributing to process improvement. Valuable lessons learned from experimentation and their use for the improvement of IT processes, in three different partially outsourced contexts, are presented in the paper by Stéphane Cortina, Alain Renault, and Michel Picard based on the TIPA® process assessment framework. The cost/benefit ratio of reaching Capability Maturity Model Integration maturity level 5 is often considered to be a priori disappointing. Lucas Grossi, José Antonio Calvo-Manzano, and Tomas San Feliu show the benefits of high maturity levels and present their experiences in coordinating the implementation in two constellations (Service and Development) in a consultancy company. Alberto Heredia, Javier Garcia-Guzman, Antonio Amescua-Seco, and Manuel Velasco-Diego address the development environment of the strongly emerging mobile app market. The paper adapts agile methodologies to the development of mass-market applications to provide project teams with a clear guide to successfully produce an app without missing any step in the process and also considering marketing issues. The paper by Masao Ito and Koichi Kishida considers the difficulties of separating safety and non-safety requirements when applying the ISO 26262 ‘Road vehicles – Functional safety’ standard whose scope is supported by the proposed method and tool. The applicability of the approach extends to a wide range of fields beyond the automotive industry. Many companies need assessments according to several standards and reference models whose separate consideration means extra costs. Xabier Larrucea and Izaskun Santamaria discuss multi-model approaches efficiently integrating different reference models and report about statistical data and conclusions derived from 47 industrial assessments. Antoni-Lluís Mesquida and Antonia Mas describe the results obtained and the lessons learned from the implementation of the ISO/IEC 29110 standard (Software engineering — Lifecycle profiles for Very Small Entities) in four small software development companies clustered in a joint process improvement program. The paper by Efi Papatheocharous and Andreas S. Andreou provides an in-depth analysis of empirical evidence on the state of practice within the agile domain obtained through a survey focusing on agile software processes and teams, and particular topics of interest encompassing communication, project management, quality assurance, and validation. The editors would like to express their thanks to the members of the EuroSPI22013 Industrial Programme Committee for their contribution to the review and selection of the papers: Bachmann Volker, SIBAC GmbH, Germany; Bæk Jørgensen Jens, Mjølner Informatics A/S, Denmark; Breske Eva, Robert Bosch GmbH, Germany; Christiansen Mads, DELTA, Denmark; Daughtrey Taz, 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; Fenz Andrea, Skills International GmbH, Austria; Forselius Pekka, 4SUM Partners, Finland; Georicke Stephan, iSQI GmbH, Germany; Hagenmeyer Philipp, ZF Friedrichshafen AG, Germany; Hallikas Jarmo, Falcon Leader Oy, Finland; Hällmayer Frank, Software Factory GmbH, Germany; Hind Tim, AXA, UK; İbrişim Ayşegül, Turkish Standards Institution, Turkey; Johansen Jørn, DELTA Axiom, Denmark; Johansson Mika, FiSMA, Finland; König Frank, ZF Friedrichshafen AG, Germany; Messnarz Richard, ISCN Ltd, Austria/Ireland; Morgenstern Jens, Germany; Nevalainen Risto, FiSMA, Finland; O'Leary Eugene, EQN Ltd., Ireland; Poth Alexander, SQS Software Quality Systems AG, Germany; Renault Samuel, Centre de Recherche Public Henri Tudor, Luxembourg; Romcea Cristina, Conti Temic microelectronic GmbH, Germany; 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, which may be made of the information contained therein. In addition to the EuroSPI research proceedings, a selection of the best industrial experience papers from the conference has been published in the Wiley ‘Journal of Software: Evolution and Process’ or its predecessors since 2004 1. The compilation for EuroSPI 2005 2 grew to gather a collection of 12 papers covering aspects that range from software standards to human factors and from software improvement to outsourcing. EuroSPI 2006 led to a collection of 10 papers under the umbrella of ‘European Industrial Experiences in Process Improvement and Innovation’ 3. In EuroSPI 2007, initiatives were presented and selected to be extended in a set of papers entitled ‘Process Improvement Lessons Learnt in Small and Large Organizations Worldwide’ 4. EuroSPI 2008 grew in the number of papers selected to reach a set of 11 papers edited under the name ‘SPI Experiences and Innovation for Global Software Development’ 5. ‘Topics in Software, Systems and Services Process Improvement’ 6 was the first of the collections published in the new ‘Journal of Software: Evolution and Process’. In this edition, hosted by Universidad de Alcala de Henares, Madrid, Spain, one of the main outputs presented by the EuroSPI initiative was the SPI manifesto. In a collection entitled ‘Industrial experiences with software process assessment and improvement’ 7, a set of seven papers was extended to be published in Volume 25 Issue 4 of the ‘Journal of Software: Evolution and Process’. EuroSPI 2011 took place in Roskilde, Denmark. ‘Application themes of software process assessment and improvement’ 8 gathers a set of nine papers covering aspects like Test SPICE, Nuclear SPICE, or Global Software Development. For 2011, in addition to the works published in ‘Journal of Software: Evolution and Process’, a new collection of papers was published in another of the key journals in the area: IET Software. Under the name ‘European Systems and Software Process Improvement and Innovation’ 9, six papers were extended to be included in the Volume 6, Issue 5 of this journal. The 2012 edition of the conference was held in Vienna. This compilation under the title ‘Software process improvement leveraged in various application domains’ 10 includes seven papers from the event. However, another special collection devoted to EuroSPI 2012 was issued in Elsevier's Computer Standards & Interfaces 36(1) under the generic name of ‘Systems, software and services process improvement’ and including set ofsix papers 11. In summary, in addition to the industrial and research proceedings, during the last 10 years, around a hundred papers have been published in top journals of the discipline. At EuroSPI 2013, the 20th anniversary of the conference was celebrated with an extra day of worldwide key notes sharing their thoughts about the next 20 years of SPI. This offers a set of leading ideas about how to continue with SPI in the future and how to even further support the innovation and improvement experiences in Europe and worldwide. From 2014 onwards, EuroSPI will use these ideas to further extend the EuroSPI scope. Also, from 2014 onwards, the European Certification and Qualification Association (ECQA) community joins EuroSPI conferences officially, and a memorandum of agreement was signed between Chinese delegations and ECQA, leading to Chinese participation from 2014. To celebrate the ongoing collaboration between EuroSPI and the Journal of Software: Evolution and Process, Wiley created in 2012 a Virtual Issue entitled ‘EuroSPI Collection’ bringing all previous EuroSPI Special Issues together in one collection. The special collection is introduced in the editorial ‘Empirical insights into process improvement: The EuroSPI papers’ 12 by Prof. Darren Dalcher, Editor-in-Chief of the journal who professionally nurtured the special issues from the beginning. The special collection is also the result of the dedication of Ms. Alice Wood, Wiley Senior Publishing Assistant. EuroSPI has an agreement with the ASQ (American Society of Quality, Software Division) to jointly issue an annual best paper award. It is planned that these best papers will be published in the Wiley journal. All this means that EuroSPI will continue growing, will be sustained for further years, and will develop more SPI stories, benefiting research and industry, to be published in collaboration with Wiley.