OPT: organization and process together

  • Authors:
  • Carolyn B. Seaman

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland

  • Venue:
  • CASCON '93 Proceedings of the 1993 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research: software engineering - Volume 1
  • Year:
  • 1993

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Abstract

The productivity of a software development effort and the quality of the resulting product are determined by the environment in which the software is created. A major driver of the effectiveness of a software production environment is the relationship between the development process and the organizational structure. The work described in this paper studies this relationship.Related work in the study of software development processes includes continuous process improvement, flexible development processes, lean development, and capability maturity. None of these have considered explicitly the importance of the underlying organizational structure to the effectiveness of the process and the quality of the product. However, the effect that an organizational structure can have on the process is of sufficient magnitude to justify considering these two elements together, as equal parts of a single system.This paper describes the OPT approach to improvement of software development environments through improvement of the organizational structure and process. The approach is an iterative improvement method. The steps include modeling the relationship between the organization and the process, measuring various properties of this relationship, and evaluating a set of goals and constraints.