A Study of Software Process Improvement in Sudanese Organizations.

Abstract

Software plays an essential and critical role in our society. Software applications are complex products that are difficult to develop and test. Very often, software exhibits unexpected and undesired behaviors that may even cause severe problems and damages. For these reasons, researchers and practitioners have been paying increasing attention to understanding and improving the quality of the software being developed. This thesis studies the Software Process Improvement (SPI) as a way of increasing software product quality. Also SPI types, goals and management are discussed. Some of Software Process Improvement Standards are presented in particular. During this thesis some Sudanese software organizations were visited, to interview software professionals and observe how these organizations can improve their software process and to identify problems that can face these organizations during implementation of Software Process Improvement Standards. The results from interviews and observations were used to design questionnaire to collect data from different views and analysis this data. It was found that Sudanese software organizations are small, most of them believe that implementations SPI standards increase software quality. The problems that can face the small organizations are Lack of skilled people who can follow standards, Lack of Top Management Support, Lack of Customer Collaboration, Project Size/Complexity, Project Team Size, and Cost. This thesis also presents some issues for future work that’s including the empirical studies to solve the problems facing the Sudanese software organizations during the implementation of SPI standards. Introducing standards standard for Sudanese software organizations is an interesting topic for further study.