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At the end of the day, it’s not whether you’re following one process or another that matters, but whether your approach successfully delivers software that people like using—and a process you and your team likes.

Different processes describe different practices to adopt and use. Many tests for good process usually assess whether you’re following the process or not, which doesn’t necessarily mean you’re delivering software people like or that you prefer to work that way.

So, to perform a quick properties-based health check on your current approach, grab a group of your team members, sit down together in a room, and discuss these properties. For each property, ask the team to rate it on a scale of one to five—five meaning you’ve got lots of that property, one meaning that property doesn’t exist for your group at all. Sometimes I use grade levels A through F. Then when looking across properties, I come up with a handy report card.

Jeff Patton

http://www.stickyminds.com/s.asp?F=S15474_COL_2

De jaarlijkse SPIder conferentie van 2009 zalt worden gehouden op dinsdag 6 oktober te Ede (Reehorst). Dit jaar is het thema: SPInoveren, inSPIreren en tranSPIreren.

Veel bedrijven maken een moeilijke tijd door, als gevolg van de kredietcrisis. In het gunstigste geval wordt er sterk in kosten gereduceerd, andere moeten reorganiseren. Extra tijd en budget voor verbeteren is bij veel organisaties voorlopig in de ijskast gezet. Dat wil zeker niet zeggen dat er geen verbeteringen meer kunnen worden gerealiseerd. Het vergt meer creativiteit door elkaar op de werkvloer te inspireren. Procesverbeteringen kunnen nog steeds worden gerealiseerd door er wat extra energie in te stoppen: transpireren.

Deze conferentie staat in het teken van innovatieve oplossingen om processen op peil te houden of te verbeteren. We hebben daar ludiek de term SPInoveren aan gekoppeld. Wat kunnen we als proces verbeteraars toevoegen om de crisis goed door te komen. InSPIreren, tranSPIreren of SPInoveren? De SPIder-conferentie is jaarlijks ook het ideale ontmoetingsmoment om met vakgenoten te spreken over proces verbeteren. Naast inSPIrerende lezingen zal er voldoende gelegenheid zijn om met collega’s te spreken. Kortom, een goede investering om inSPIratie op te doen.

http://www.spiderconferentie.nl

As the profession of software engineering evolves and matures, it must achieve some of the critical elements needed for recognition as a bona fide discipline. Among these elements are the establishment of a recognized body of knowledge (BOK) and certification of professional practitioners.

The body of knowledge contained in this report is designed to complement the IEEE Computer Society’s Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) by delineating the skills and concepts that compose the knowledge areas and competencies of a proven-effective process improvement method, the Personal Software Process (PSP). As adoption of the PSP methodology continues to grow, it becomes crucial to document the fundamental knowledge and skills that set PSP practitioners apart from other software professionals. The PSP BOK serves this purpose and more. It helps individual practitioners to assess and improve their own skills; provides employers with an objective baseline for assessing the personal process skills and capabilities of their product development team members; and guides academic institutions that want to incorporate PSP into their software and other engineering courses or curricula. The PSP BOK also facilitates the development of PSP certification programs that are based on a well-established, standard set of knowledge and skills.

Marsha Pomeroy-Huff
Robert Cannon
Timothy A. Chick
Julia Mullaney
William Nichols

http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/09sr018.cfm

The People Capability Maturity Model (CMM) is a tool that helps you successfully address the critical people issues in your organization. The People CMM employs the process maturity framework of the highly successful Capability Maturity Model for Software (SW-CMM) as a foundation for a model of best practices for managing and developing an organization’s workforce. The Software CMM has been used by software organizations around the world for guiding dramatic improvements in their ability to improve productivity and quality, reduce costs and time to market, and increase customer satisfaction. Based on the best current practices in fields such as human resources, knowledge management, and organizational development, the People CMM guides organizations in improving their processes for managing and developing their workforce.

Bill Curtis
Bill Hefley
Sally Miller

http://www.sei.cmu.edu/publications/documents/09.reports/09tr003.html

Among the many changes in the software industry over the past 40 years, the consideration of information technology (IT) from a return-on-investment (ROI) perspective is fairly dramatic. Decades ago, IT was considered a necessary overhead expense. Now, profit-generating business units regard software as a critical part of their infrastructure and competitive advantage. In fact, companies that do not leverage information technology as a key part of their business strategy to cut costs and increase productivity may ultimately cease to exist. Simply put, the proper positioning of IT and its associated processes is now vital to keeping corporations in business.

Many senior managers today are focused on cutting costs, increasing profitability, and improving productivity. Because an IT organization is traditionally a cost center, and not a profit center, it is very difficult to discuss the development of software in terms of profitability. So for now, let’s not attempt to address the ROI issue in terms of pure profit. But parts of the software development lifecycle can be quantified in terms of cost savings and increased productivity, which are actually two sides of the same coin since both can be reduced to the ROI factor.

Colin O’Neill
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/edge/09/mar09/oneill/index.html

The CMMI for Services (CMMI-SVC), Version 1.2 model, scheduled for release in mid-March 2009, instead has been released in February 2009.

In lean economic times, service organizations, which make up 80% of the world economy, can benefit by using process improvement to make the most of their resources to achieve desired business results. CMMI for Services (CMMI-SVC) is a guide to help service provider organizations reduce costs, improve quality, and improve the predictability of schedules.

Customers are requesting that their service providers demonstrate a CMMI rating or capability profile, but attempts to use CMMI-DEV in a service setting can distort the integrity of appraisal results. Service providers deserve the same opportunity that the development community has enjoyed for years. They deserve the opportunity to improve their processes based on community models of practice that specifically address the interests and concerns of service providers. CMMI-SVC is the model of practice that service organizations have been waiting for.

CMMI-SVC provides best practices that service providers can use when they
* Decide what services they should be providing, define standard services, and let people know about them
* Make sure they have everything they need to deliver a service, including people, processes, consumables, and equipment
* Get new systems in place, change existing systems, retire obsolete systems, all while making sure nothing goes terribly wrong with the service
* Set up agreements, take care of service requests, and operate service systems
* Make sure they have the resources needed to deliver services and that services are available when needed—at an appropriate cost
* Handle what goes wrong—and prevent it from going wrong in the first place if possible
* Ensure they are ready to recover from potential disasters and get back to delivering services if the disaster occurs

http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmmi/models/CMMI-Services-status.html
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/publications/documents/09.reports/09tr001.html

Have you ever been on a project where some person or group is holding up the works? They are called the “bottleneck” station, and here are some usual and unusual strategies for improving output in the presence of various bottlenecks.

In any project or organization, some person, group, or station inevitably acts as a bottleneck to the organization’s output. This is, of course, trivially true: Once the output of that station improves so it is not the bottleneck, some other station becomes the limiting factor.

For just that reason, I will not discuss in this article options about improving the performance at individual stations. I will, rather, discuss ways to improve total system results once you have tried all you can think of for the key stations. If you find a way to improve the performance at the bottleneck station, then you get to start all over, working out where the new bottleneck is and how to improve total system performance in the presence of that bottleneck.

Assuming, then, that you have done all you can to improve the output ability at the bottleneck station, it is sometimes possible to further improve output by putting attention on the non-bottleneck stations.

The odd part about these strategies is that when we use the spare capacity at the non-bottleneck stations, we will sometimes deliberately allow “rework” in order to gain an advantage at the bottleneck station. This is counterintuitive to most people: Most of our industry is founded on the notion that we should avoid rework like the plague.

I will refer to this as “spending” efficiency locally for a global gain.

Once you start looking for this, you will see people in ordinary life doing exactly that: Those who have a bit of spare time find ways to help the bottleneck group and streamline the overall flow. The way in which efficiency is best spent differs according to the situation. Taking a look at those alternatives is what this article is about.

Alistair Cockburn

http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/crosstalk/2009/01/0901Cockburn.html

Agile development methods and CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) best practices are often perceived to be at odds with each other. This report clarifies why the discord need not exist and proposes that CMMI and Agile champions work toward deriving benefit from using both and exploit synergies that have the potential to dramatically improve business performance.

Hillel Glazer
Jeff Dalton
David Anderson
Mike Konrad
Sandy Shrum

http://www.sei.cmu.edu/publications/documents/08.reports/08tn003.html

SPIder, the Dutch network for Software Process Improvement and Quality organizes the 11th yearly National conference. Focus of this years conference is the landscape of improvement approaches, from direction & (multi) model driven approaches to agile bottom-up continuous improvement. Topics will include models, tools & people aspects. Keynotes include Lean Six Sigma for Innovation, and seduction (Dutch: verleiding) as a way to change behavior in organisations. The conference will be in Dutch.

http://www.spiderconferentie.nl