Silver Bullet: An Iterative Model for Process Definition and Improvement
Stacey J. Gelman · AT&T Technical Journal · 1994
AT&T's competitive advantage depends upon its capacity to respond to customers' escalating demands for high-performance, high-quality, and timely software products. An adaptable, robust software development process is a key means to succeed. The Silver Bullet project was designed to show the Operations Systems Business Unit how to create and adapt processes that employ the most productive technologies to help project teams serve their customers. Our insight was to build upon the concept of a customer-supplier partnership between a small group of full-time process engineers (the supplier) and the product development teams (the customers). The iterative model for process definition and improvement, which is described here, emerged as we institutionalized processes to facilitate the creative dialog between these two groups.