So you want brooks in your classroom?
Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Software engineering
Understanding the importance of roles in architecture-related process improvement: a case study
PROFES'05 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Product Focused Software Process Improvement
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Software development is one of the most economically critical engineering activities. It isunsettling, therefore, that regularly published analyses reveal that the percentage of projectsthat fail, by coming in far over budget or far past schedule, or by being cancelled withsignificant financial loss, is considerably greater in software development than in any otherbranch of engineering. The reason is that successful software development requires expertisein both State of the Art (software technology) and State of the Practice (software developmentprocess). It is widely recognized that failure to follow best practice, rather thantechnological incompetence, is the cause of most failures. It is critically important, therefore,that (i) computer science departments be able assess the quality of the software developmentprocess component of their curricula and that industry be able to assess the efficacy of SPI(Software Process Improvement) efforts.While assessment instruments/tools exist for knowledge of software technology, none existfor attitude toward, knowledge of, or ability to use, software development process. We havedeveloped instruments for measuring attitude and knowledge, and are working on aninstrument to measure ability to use. The current version of ATSE, the instrument formeasuring Attitude Toward Software Engineering, is the result of repeated administrations toboth students and software development professionals, post-administration focus groups,rewrites, and statistical reliability analyses. In this paper we discuss the development ofATSE, results, both expected an unexpected, of recent administrations of ATSE to studentsand professionals, the various uses to which ATSE is currently being put and to which itcould be put, and ATSE's continuing development and improvement.