TENSIONS IN THE ADOPTION AND EVOLUTION OF SOFTWARE QUALITY MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
Helen Sharp, Fiona Hovenden, Mark Woodman, Nathan London · 2003
This paper reports some results from a project to uncover the non-technical factors that affect the adoption and evolution of Software Quality Management Systems (referred to here as 'the quality effort'). The data which the paper discusses comes from interviews with people involved in the quality effort in four different companies. Our approach to data collection was to use semistructured interviews and to encourage interviewees to talk about their experiences of quality management in their own organisations. We analysed this data using discourse analysis, informed by ethnographic observation, and identified a number of themes, one of which was the tensions that exist between developers and the quality effort. In this paper, we present and discuss some data which illustrates the tensions we found. 1. BACKGROUND This paper describes the collection and analysis of qualitative empirical data to investigate the non-technical factors influencing the adoption and evolution of software quality management systems (SQMS). We collected a variety of data through our project, but in this paper we concentrate on data from semi-structured interviews conducted with quality managers.