|
Making Process Improvement Work
Software process improvement too often reflects a significant disconnect between theory and practice. This book bridges the gap -- offering a straightforward, systematic approach to planning, implementing, and monitoring a process improvement program. Project managers will appreciate the book's concise presentation style and will be able to apply its
practical ideas immediately to real-life challenges. With examples based on the authors' own extensive experience, this book shows how to define goals that directly address the needs of your organization, use improvement models appropriately, and devise a pragmatic action plan. In addition, it reveals valuable strategies for deploying organizational change, and delineates essential metrics for tracking your progress. Appendices provide examples of an action plan, arisk management plan, and a mini-assessment process. For those managers who are tired of chronic project difficulties, constant new improvement schemes, and a lack of real progress, this easily digestible volume provides the real-world wisdom you need to realize positive change in your organization.
You are probably more than aware of the problems facing your software development organization. The list of problems usually starts with an overwhelming string of commitments and optimistic deadlines. For example, the marketing department has been promised that the product will be shipped by the end of the year. Customers have been told that everything will be delivered on time, and top management has established year-end bonuses based on meeting these dates. Now the programmers are working progressively longer hours, and the system test group is anxiously awaiting the software in order to begin intensive testing. The technical writers are lost in 300 pull-down menus and cannot get feedback from the programmers. Meanwhile, support engineers are still fixing defects from the previous release and are not optimistic that their lives will improve any time soon.
On top of all this, your group has been signed up to use the new standards and processes developed by corporate engineering. At best, this sounds like just another documentation exercise with little or no positive impact on your group. You have been through numerous improvement programs, each one consuming time, but not providing you with the gains you had hoped for. The benefits you did see were quickly forgotten in subsequent projects.
Sound familiar? If you have lived in an organization like this for a year or two, you are probably a little tired of the chronic problems, new improvement schemes and lack of real progress. If you are ready for a straightforward, systematic approach to improvement, read on.
This book is for managers and practitioners. If you are the director ofa division, read the book to understand how your group can systematically improve and tie those improvements directly to your business goals. If you are a project or program manager tasked with developing a specific product, use the information to plan, deploy and track improvements within your team. If you are a process improvement, quality management or development engineer, apply the techniques in each chapter to coach your team through its improvement journey.
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
Ch. 1 Developing a Plan
Ch. 2 Implementing the Plan
Ch. 3 Checking Progress
Conclusion
App. A Mapping Goals and Problems to CMM (v1.1)
App. B Mapping Goals and Problems to CMM (v1.1) and CMMI Systems Engineering/Software Engineering/Integrated Product and Process Development, version 1.1 (SE/SW/IPPD v1.1)
App. C Action Plan Example
App. D Risk Management Plan Example
App. E Summary of SEI CMM (v1.1) and CMMI-SE/SW/IPPD (v1.1)
App. F Mini-Assessment Process
References
Index
|
