Empirical study of implementing product line practices in a software-producing organisation
Heather Tiley, Jay van Zyl, Alistair J. Walker · 2002
Software delivery organisations are required to produce commercially viable innovative products in a short space of time. A balance must be created between product innovation and process innovation, when developing software systems, to ensure product commercialisation. While numerous software engineering 'best practices' exist, such as ISO/IEC JTC1 Software Engineering Standards, SWEBOK (Software Engineering Body of Knowledge) and SEBOK (Software Engineering Institute), these focus on the direct delivery of software and often fail to connect with the realities of commercial business.Quality related bodies form a system for worldwide standardisation as a whole and, together with the Software Engineering Institute (IES), Quality Assurance Institute (QAI) and others, have played an important role in providing this balance.The Process Innovation Imperative [Van Zyl 2001] is an investigation that was the result of thirteen years of research in the software and related industries. This research identified various conceptual models that were used together with the ISO/IEC TR 15504 framework in order to facilitate process innovation. This paper covers work that was performed for the period June 1999 through to March 2001, as part of the Process Improvement Imperative, in the engineering division of a medium sized new generation IT company. The organisation was founded in 1994 and delivers dynamic, component-based applications to customers in the financial services industry that meet their needs in rapidly changing business environments and that are flexible to adapt to changing needs over time.The purpose of the work reported in this paper, carried out as part of the Product Management Architecture project, was firstly to re-implement and focus product line practices within a software-producing organisation. This was done by implementing the models identified in the Process Innovation Imperative within the framework of ISO/IEC TR 15504; and secondly to record and analyse data in order to derive empirical evidence of improvements within the organisation.The paper describes the process that was used, and the data collected during this process is used to provide empirical evidence of improvements within the organisation.