Practical approach to development of SPI activities in a large organization: Toshiba's SPI history since 2000

For the effective promotion of software process improvement (SPI) activities in a large-scale organization, it is necessary to establish an organizational structure and a deployment method for promotion and to develop training courses, support tools, and other materials. Even if an organizational promotion system is established, the SPI activities of each development department cannot be promoted effectively without SPI community. To promote SPI activities throughout the TOSHIBA group, we organized a Corporate Software Engineering Process Group in April 2000. We also have been focused to establish SPI community, while promoting SPI activities in each development department. The fundamental our operating policy of SPI is "bottom-up". This paper discusses the problems encountered in the promotion of SPI activities and presents solutions to the problems. The actual results obtained show that the framework and solutions developed by us can be used to effectively promote SPI activities.