Commitment development in software process improvement: critical misconceptions

  • Authors:

  • Pekka Abrahamsson

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Oulu, Department of Information Processing Science, P.O. Box 3000, FIN-90014, Finland

  • Venue:
  • ICSE '01 Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

It has been well established in the software process improvement (SPI) literature and practice that without commitment from all organizational levels to SPI the initiative will most likely fail or the results are not far reaching. Commitment construct is explored and three forms of commitment are introduced: affective, continuance and normative commitment. Analysis shows that current models of commitment development lack scientific validity and are based on four misconceptions: (1) the assumption of linearity of the human cognitive processes (i.e., commitment in this case), (2) the controllability of this process, (3) the notion of singular commitment construct, and (4) the sole utility perspective on the commitment phenomenon. Implications of these findings for SPI research and practice are discussed.