Software Engineering Process And Process Improvement In Software Process

PROCESS IMPROVEMENT
Process improvement refers to understanding of the existing process and changing them to enhance product quality and/or reduce costs and development time(Sommerville,2009).
Process improvement in software process or simply software process improvement is now being employed by many software companies as a method or way to increase the quality of the software that are being developed and used as a cost reduction technique and a way to accelerate the development process.
Process improvement involves use of two different approaches:
1. Process maturity approach
In this approach more emphasis is put on introduction of good software engineering practice into an organization.
2. The agile approach
Here the emphasis is put on

- Other factors also come into play when we talk about design-based activities.
Factors affecting software Product quality
Consider the illustrative diagram below
Quality Factors
- This highly depends on the size of the project
- In Large projects with average capabilities product quality is determined by the development process
- What determines quality for small projects is the is the capabilities of the developers as such development technology comes in handy in this case.
Process improvement process
There is no universal improvement process that works for all organizations or in all software products.
For a particular process improvement process to work high consideration must be put to the local environment and culture and how they will be affected by the process.
Processes established must consider the following
- Company size
- Staff background and skills
- Type of software being developed
- Customer and market requirements and
- Company culture.
An interest might be put in improvement of some of the process attribute such as development time and it has to be decided which attributes are the most important for the company.
Process

Process change training – engineers learn and understand the proposed changes.
5. Change Tuning – this involves a tuning phase which helps in discovering minor problems and necessary modifications to the process are proposed and introduced.
Problems associated with process change
1. Resistance to change
2. Change persistence
CMMI process improvement framework
CMMI stands for Capability Maturity Model Integration. This is a framework that supersedes CMM which is Capability Maturity Model which was introduced in the early 1990s. It is a process level improvement training and appraisal program, administered by the CMMI institute and was developed by Carnegie Mellon University. It is the current working stage on process assessment and improvement that started at the Software Engineering Institute(SEI) in the 1980s.
Staged CMMI model This model is equivalent to the Software Capability Maturity Model whereby it acts as a means to measure the process capability of an organization in one of five levels and set the targets or goals that should be accomplished at each level. This model measures the organization’s ability as a whole. Process improvement is accomplished by employing practices at each level, by moving from lower to higher levels in the model as shown