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.

Nowadays, societies crucially depend on high-quality software for a large part of their functionalities and activities. Therefore, software professionals, researchers, managers, and practitioners alike have to competently decide what software technologies and products to choose for which purpose. For various reasons, systematic empirical studies employing strictly scientific methods are hardly practiced in software engineering. Thus there is an unquestioned need for developing improved and better-qualified empirical methods, for their application in practice and for dissemination of the results. This book describes different kinds of empirical studies and methods for performing such studies, e.g., for planning, performing, analyzing, and reporting such studies. Actual studies are presented in detail in various chapters dealing with inspections, testing, object-oriented techniques, and component-based software engineering.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Software Quality, ECSQ 2002, held in Helsinki, Finland, in June 2002.The 31 revised full papers presented together with seven abstracts of invited presentations were carefully reviewed and selected from 78 technical and experience-based paper submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on quality at Web, requirements engineering and QA, process improvement experience, risk and cost management, personal software process, partnering for quality, defect management, the COTS market, XP and/or maturity, new approaches to testing, and effective inspection.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th European Workshop on Software Process Technology, EWSPT 2000, held in Kaprun, Austria in February 2000 in conjunction with a meeting of the European ESPRIT IV Project for Process Instance Evolution (PIE).The 21 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 44 submissions. The book is organized in sections on methods, applications, process instance evolution, distributed processes and process modeling languages, and industrial experience.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Software Configuration Management, SCM-7, held in conjunction with the 1997 IEEE/CS International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE'97, in Boston, MA, USA, in May 1997.
The book presents 16 revised full papers selected from a total of 49 submissions. The papers are organized in sections on versioning models, reuse and system models, process aspects, distributed SCM, SCM on the Web, and industrial experience, This book competently reports the state of the art in software configuration management.

Organized by: IFIP Working Group 2.4 on Systems Programming Languages in Cooperation with ACM SIGPLAN/SIGSOFT

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.