For over a decade, software process improvement (SPI) has been promoted as an approach to improve systematically the way software is developed and managed. Mostly this research and the relevant experience reports have been focussed on large software companies.

Conradi and his co-authors have collected the main results from four Norwegian industrial research and development projects on SPI carried out between 1996 and 2005, which, in contrast to other treatments, concentrated on small- and medium-sized companies, typically characterized by fast-changing environments and processes. The presentation is organized in five sections: general principles and methods of SPI, knowledge management for SPI, process modelling and electronic process guides, estimation methods, and object-oriented and component-based systems. A spectrum of empirical methods has been used, e.g. case studies, large-scale experiments, surveys and interviews, and action research.

The book mainly targets researchers and graduate students in (empirical) software engineering, and software professionals working in development or quality assurance.

This book gathers chapters from some of the top international empirical software engineering researchers focusing on the practical knowledge necessary for conducting, reporting and using empirical methods in software engineering. Topics and features include guidance on how to design, conduct and report empirical studies. The volume also provides information across a range of techniques, methods and qualitative and quantitative issues to help build a toolkit applicable to the diverse software development contexts

For over a decade, software process improvement (SPI) has been promoted as an approach to improve systematically the way software is developed and managed. Mostly this research and the relevant experience reports have focused on large software companies. This book collects the main results from four Norwegian industrial research and development projects on SPI carried out between 1996 and 2005. It concentrates on small and medium-sized companies, typically characterized by fast-changing environments.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Persistent Object Systems, POS-9, held in Lillehammer, Norway, in September 2001.The 19 revised full papers presented together with seven session overviews and an epilogue were selected during two rounds of reviewing and revision for inclusion in the proceedings. Among the topics addressed are persistence-enabled optimization, Java applications, JVM, systems architecture, persistent GIS, data sharing middleware, polylingual persistence, transactions, distributed object systems, object stores, garbage collectors, WWW and persistence, persistent computation implementation, orthogonally persistent Java, and personal information devices.

This book gathers chapters from some of the top international empirical software engineering researchers focusing on the practical knowledge necessary for conducting, reporting and using empirical methods in software engineering. Topics and features include guidance on how to design, conduct and report empirical studies. The volume also provides information across a range of techniques, methods and qualitative and quantitative issues to help build a toolkit applicable to the diverse software development contexts