The 7th International Conference on Product Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES 2006) brought together researchers and industrial practitioners for reporting new research results and exchanging experiences and findings in the area of process and product improvement. The focus of the conference was on understanding, evaluating, controlling, and improving the relationship between process improvement activities (such as the deployment of innovative defect detection processes) and their effects on products (such as improved product reliability and safety). Consequently, major topics of the conference included the evaluation of existing software process improvement (SPI) approaches in different contexts, the presentation of new or modified SPI approaches, and the relation between SPI and new development techniques or emerging application domains. The need for SPI is being widely recognized. Current trends in software intensive systems such as increased distribution of software development and growing dependability on software-intensive systems in everyday life emphasize this need. This implies the establishment of advanced process improvement capabilities and an adequate understanding of the impact of the processes on the generated products, services, and business value in different situations. Recent trends enforce the establishment of such capabilities: more and more products are being developed in distributed, global environments with many customer-supplier relations in the development chain. Outsourcing, off-shoring, near-shoring, and in-sourcing aggravate this trend. In addition, systems are being built from multiple disciplines (such as electronics, mechanics, and software). Supporting such distributed and multi-disciplinary development requires well-understood and accurately implemented development process interfaces, process synchronization, and process evolution.

Klappentext

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement, PROFES 2006, held in Amsterdam, June 2006. The volume presents 26 revised full papers and 12 revised short papers together with 6 reports on workshops and tutorials. The papers constitute a balanced mix of academic and industrial aspects, organized in topical sections on decision support, embedded software and system development, measurement, process improvement, and more.

Inhalt
Keynote Addresses.- Processes and the Software Business.- Controlling the Chaos of the CMMI Continuous Representation.- Evidence-Based Software Engineering and Systematic Literature Reviews.- Expanding the Scope of Software Product Families: Problems and Alternative Approaches.- Decision Support.- Defining the Process for Making Software System Modernization Decisions.- Introducing Tool Support for Retrospective Analysis of Release Planning Decisions.- A Qualitative Evaluation Method for Business Process Tools.- Embedded Software and System Development.- An Effective Source Code Review Process for Embedded Software.- Troubleshooting Large-Scale New Product Development Embedded Software Projects.- Software Process Improvement with Agile Practices in a Large Telecom Company.- Measurement.- Assessing Software Product Maintainability Based on Class-Level Structural Measures.- Integrating Reuse Measurement Practices into the ERP Requirements Engineering Process.- Process Definition and Project Tracking in Model Driven Engineering.- Industrial Experiences.- Difficulties in Establishing a Defect Management Process: A Case Study.- A Case Study on the Success of Introducing General Non-construction Activities for Project Management and Planning Improvement.- The Concerns of Prototypers and Their Mitigating Practices: An Industrial Case-Study.- An Industrial Case Study on the Choice Between Language Customization Mechanisms.- Preliminary Results from a Survey of Multimedia Development Practices in Australia.- An ISO 9001:2000 Certificate and Quality Awards from Outside What's Inside? A Case Study.- Process Improvement.- Implementing Software Process Improvement Initiatives: An Empirical Study.- Using Linear Regression Models to Analyse the Effect of Software ProcessImprovement.- Taba Workstation: Supporting Software Process Deployment Based on CMMI and MR-MPS.BR.- Analysis of an Artifact Oriented Test Process Model and of Testing Aspects of CMMI.- Agile Development Practices.- The Impact of Pair Programming and Test-Driven Development on Package Dependencies in Object-Oriented Design An Experiment.- Applying an Agility/Discipline Assessment for a Small Software Organisation.- Lessons Learned from an XP Experiment with Students: Test-First Needs More Teachings.- An Empirical Study on Design Quality Improvement from Best-Practice Inspection and Pair Programming.- Product Line Engineering.- A Variability-Centric Approach to Instantiating Core Assets in Product Line Engineering.- Improving the Development of e-Business Systems by Introducing Process-Based Software Product Lines.- Assessing Requirements Compliance Scenarios in System Platform Subcontracting.- Short Papers.- Software Inspections in Practice: Six Case Studies.- Productivity of Test Driven Development: A Controlled Experiment with Professionals.- Results and Experiences from an Empirical Study of Fault Reports in Industrial Projects.- Software Process Improvement: A Road to Success.- Characterization of Runaway Software Projects Using Association Rule Mining.- A Framework for Selecting Change Strategies in IT Organizations.- Building Software Process Line Architectures from Bottom Up.- Refinement of Software Architectures by Recursive Model Transformations.- A UML-Based Process Meta-model Integrating a Rigorous Process Patterns Definition.- Ad Hoc Versus Systematic Planning of Software Releases A Three-Staged Experiment.- A Software Process Tailoring System Focusing to Quantitative Management Plans.- An Extreme Approach to Automating Software Development withCBD, PLE and MDA Integrated.- Workshops.- Experiences and Methods from Integrating Evidence-Based Software Engineering into Education.- Workshop on Embedded Software Development in Collaboration.- Tutorials.- Software Product Metrics Goal-Oriented Software Product Measurement.- Art and Science of System Release Planning.- Multiple Risk Management Process Supported by Ontology.- Get Your Experience Factory Ready for the Next Decade: Ten Years After How to Build and Run One.