Strategically balanced process adoption

Abstract

Software processes have an important role to play in realizing organizational strategies. When a software organization is about to decide on the adoption of a new process, it should have a clear understanding of its own strategic objectives, as well as the potentials of the new method in supporting or hindering its strategic plan. From this perspective, a successful process adoption initiative is one which provides maximum support to the strategic objectives of an organization while producing a minimum of adverse effects. This paper introduces the concept of Strategically Balanced Process Adoption (SBPA) for anticipating and monitoring the strategic impacts of a new process before and after its adoption. A set of techniques are proposed for the realization of SBPA, which are based on a repository of method fragments, introduced in an earlier ICSP paper. The proposed techniques are deployed in an industrial experience, where the subject organization was about to adopt a custom-designed agile process. The proposed techniques of SBPA helped the subject organization to better design the to-be process, with improved control over its enactment.