Software process improvement in Europe: potential of the new V-modell XT and research issues

The goal of European industrial practice to support high-value software production in diversified domains has led to the development of a huge number of process model variants. However, these diverse models are hard to compare, which hinders efficient collaboration and software process improvement on a European level. Process managers see a growing need for approaches that support stakeholder collaboration, systematic process mapping, and transformation of processes to improve their leverage in software process improvement. In this article we present the V-Modell XT (VM XT), a flexible software process model approach that has recently been announced as the standard for public-sector IT projects in Germany, as promising opportunity to help provide a unifying European software process model ‘umbrella’. On the basis of strengths of the VM XT, we suggest research directions for advanced support of software projects: (i) effective business value translation to engineering solutions that strengthens stakeholder collaboration, (ii) process mapping that enables collaboration in projects that have to reconcile several process models, and (iii) process ‘product lines’ to capture the variability of software processes on domain and company levels and thus systematically help investigate best-practice approaches to software construction. We discuss these concepts, the contribution of the VM XT, and conclude with next steps for research and validation. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.