Abstract
This paper describes a longitudinal study of an organisation over a period of eighteen months as it initiated and then implemented a manual of software best practice. The organisation consists of end-users, in the sense that, although developing software is an integral part of their job, they are not professional software developers. Although the organisation itself was unaware of current trends in Software Process Improvement (SPI) or theories of organisational learning, our case study affords us insights into some practical deficiencies of the accepted techno-centric model of a SPI programme. We argue that such a model imposes unnatural work practices on an organisation and fails to take account of how process improvements might occur spontaneously within a community of practice.
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© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Segal, J. (2001). Organisational Learning and Software Process Improvement: A Case Study. In: Althoff, KD., Feldmann, R.L., Müller, W. (eds) Advances in Learning Software Organizations. LSO 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2176. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44814-4_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44814-4_8
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