An Overview Of The Practitioners, Processes and Products Project

An overview of the work of a research project is useful because it can provide the reader with a clear introduction to that project. This paper provides such an overview for the work we have conducted as part of the Practitioners, Processes and Products (PPP) project. Process assessment and improvement models have increased in prominence, and a number of standards or awards for quality have been introduced. While we accept the important contributions of these models and standards, we also believe that the human factors in the processes have not been properly examined. The PPP project focuses on human factors and their relationship to the implementation of software process improvement programmes. This paper describes the empirical ‘breadth’ and ‘depth’ of the project, summarises the main arguments that underpin the project, reviews the publications to-date, provides a ‘profile’ of the companies involved in the main study, and presents some preliminary findings.