Towards a strategy for analysing benefits of Software Process Improvement programs
Abstract
Software processes improvement (SPI) program have been used by several organizations that aim to have better competitive advantage. Since it involves high costs (time and money), it is essential to have some estimate about the return on investment when applying SPI programs. After a large study of the literature, by performing a systematic mapping, we concluded that despite of the existence of several initiatives, the estimate of return on investment for SPI is not very applied in practice, and it is still an open and challenging issue. In general, the existing approaches propose to perform the estimation using a monetary unit, which makes the process difficult to be applied. Based on the results of this study, we propose a light approach to estimate the return on investment for SPI, that considers not only economics aspects but also any kind of benefits obtained by the organization aligned to their business strategy. In this paper, we present the systematic mapping, our conclusions and this approach that we called a strategy for analyzing benefits of SPI programs, defined based on the results of the systematic mapping