Latitudinal and longitudinal process diversity
Nils T. Siebel, Stephen C. Cook, Manoranjan Satpathy, Daniel Rodríguez · Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution Research and Practice · 2003
Abstract Software processes vary across organizations and over time. Managing this process diversity is a delicate balancing act between creative, healthy diversity and chaos. In this paper, we examine a particular aspect of this issue, namely some relationships between diversity in software processes, software evolution and the quality of software products and processes. Our main contribution is to distinguish between two broad kinds of process diversity, which we call latitudinal and longitudinal process diversity. To illustrate the differences between these two, we examine the case of a medium‐sized system (50 000 lines of C++ code) which has undergone major changes during its lifetime of 10 years. The software was originally developed by an individual academic using a research‐oriented process to develop a standalone proof‐of‐concept system. In a current multi‐team project, involving three industrial and three academic partners, the software has been adapted for integration as a subsystem of a near‐market product. We suggest ways in which the observed process diversity seems to be linked to a change in the software's propensity for evolution, and we discuss the impact of this on both product and process quality. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.