Designing a Maturity Model for a Distributed Software Organization. An Experience Report

Abstract

We present early experiences with defining and validating a software maturity model (SMM) for a distributed, research-driven organization of independent and self-organizing teams of diverse cultures, experience and maturity. The paper briefly outlines the model, but focuses on the early stages of building and validating it. Based on that, we identify major factors contributing to the successful deployment of a SMM.

Two Case Studies on Implementing Best Practices for Software Process Improvement

“…A large part of SPI in G ÉANT is founded on Common Best Practices (CBPs) [15,6]. Unlike the goals identified in the Software Maturity Model (SMM) [16], which set objectives for the teams, but do not indicate the ways of addressing them, the CBPs also provide directional guidance on what could be done in order to achieve the specific goals defined in the SMM. The guidance is based on the experience of other teams and the activities that have been shown to succeed in G ÉANT's setting.…”

Monitoring the adoption of SPI-related best practices. An experience report

“…The CBPs for G ÉANT software teams provide directional guidance and recommendations on how to achieve specific goals defined in the SMM [5], but they need to be customized and adapted by the teams to the local context. As a result, the generality of recommendations included in a practice appears to be a balanced trade-off between delivering actionable procedures on one hand and ensuring the necessary generality on the other [6].…”

“…In previous papers [4,5,6] we presented earlier stages of developing an SPI process in G ÉANT, a pan-European project that originated from networking, but it currently includes also an important component of network-based services supported by software-intensive systems. G ÉANT software teams are diverse in terms of language, nationality and work culture.…”

Best practices for software maturity improvement: a GÉANT case study

“…As a consequence, although numerous models exist, they still need to be merged, customized or redefined to reflect the specific requirements and settings and to embrace all areas relevant for software development. To respond to this, in previous papers [14] we presented a preliminary version of the GSMM, a maturity model dedicated for the G ÉANT organisation, along with recommendations on how to define models and implement them [15].…”

“…The G ÉANT Software Maturity Model (GSMM) has been designed to achieve two primary goals: (1) to capture key practices that already help the teams to successfully deliver software, and (2) to identify areas for further improvements that could be applied by the teams [15,14].…”