This paper provides an overview to the theme of this issue, the software‐development process; i.e., the integration of practices, technology, and platforms into an environment for the development of software products. With a well‐defined software‐development process, an organization can optimize its development intervals, minimize costs, and maximize performance. In this paper, we describe the work going on in some AT&T business units to define and improve the process of software development and, thereby, shorten the time to market for products and improve product quality. In particular, we focus on two projects that provide mechanisms organizations can use to achieve and measure improvement in their software‐development processes. These mechanisms emphasize the process and its components. By using these mechanisms, a software‐development organization can choose the most appropriate practices, technology, and platforms to support its processes and measure the results of using these choices. Thus, the organization can quickly become process focused and reap the benefits of this approach to software development.
Developing and enhancing AT&T's products and services involves many disciplines and technologies (e.g., hardware, software, and firmware devices). Reviews and audits during the development process are among the tools that ensure that development projects produce products and services that meet customers expectations effectively and efficiently, and drive continuous quality improvement. The audits and reviews routinely used by projects include project management audits, software process assessments, technical reviews (e.g., architecture reviews), and postmortems. This article discusses the nature of these tools, their applications in the AT&T development community, and the lessons learned from the company's experience with them.
Software‐development organizations throughout industry are striving for better ways to develop, deploy, and maintain their products. Changing an organization's well‐established operating procedures—to improved methods and techniques—is always a substantial challenge. But, quite often, change is crucial for maintaining competitiveness and ensuring long‐term success. This paper analyzes the challenge, and identifies key elements of a typical migration path to creating a new operating paradigm. The paper also provides a framework for technology insertion, a methodology that helps develop a disciplined engineering process, allowing software projects to advance systematically in their journey to success. Experience with the AT&T mosaic of integrated software processes, known as MOSAIC, and the software‐development environment (SDE), shows how MOSAIC and SDE support project teams undergoing organizational change.
The intent of this paper is twofold: first, to comment on the general properties of the UNIX* operating system as a tool for software product development and as a basis for such products; and second, to introduce the remaining papers of this issue.
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