An experiment on decoding, monitoring, controlling and engineering a software project

Objective

The Engineering Group is one the Italy's leading privately owned software companies, specialising above all in major technological integration projects. The Group's parent-company, Engineering Ingegneria Informatica (or, briefly, Engineering), was the first company in the Group, created in 1980. An important characteristics of the Group's various operational units scattered throughout Italy is their great operational independence and strong roots in the various geographical and sectorial realities.
One main business objective of Engineering is to strengthen and widen its distributed structure.
The experiment is of great relevance for aligning the objective with the need for an effective and efficient central co-ordination, support and control. The revision of some crucial processes involving both local and central organisational entities will contribute to 1) reduce cycle times and work overheads; 2) enhance co-operation and sharing of experiences and know-how among distributed units.
Technical objectives to be achieved include:
Better understanding of the activities performed in the software development process, both in terms of structures and costs.
Higher ability to improve and reengineer company's development process.
Acquisition of higher reliability in the estimate of time and resources required by each process.
Better resource allocation and management.
Development of a corporate knowledge on BPR.

THE EXPERIMENT
The project's goal of improving company's software development process will be addressed by means of the adoption and experimentation of a method to:
Describe the process
Monitor and control its evolution
Engineer, improve and reengineer it.
To describe the process and engineer it, the method conceived by Ivar Jacobson, based on an object oriented approach, and described in his book "The object advantage: Business Process Reengineering with Object Technology" will be adopted. To monitor and control a process evolution, an activity based costing approach will be adopted, and specifically the one designed by Innes and Mitchell.
The use of a tool - SA/BPR Professional by Popkin Software & Systems, Inc. - is envisaged to support modelling and analysis.
The experiment will use as baseline a project devoted to the development of significant parts of the information system of a large Italian municipality. The project foresees both the customisation of company's packages and the development from scratch with the joint involvement of local Production Site and central Package Department. It is a good sample of the kind of projects the company is normally involved in.

EXPECTED IMPACT AND EXPERIENCE
Better development process: clear and neat description of the process, reliable data on resources consumption by the process
Better management of company's distributed structure: the overhead due to distribution is expected to reduce to 35% on the average (currently, 40-55%)
More reliable estimates of development time and costs: The experiment applied to the baseline project is expected to make error on effort estimates go down to 15 - 20%
More effective structure of the distributed activities: reengineering of non-ideal activities
Reduction of cycle time and of work overhead: the actual delay in time to deliver of 10% is expected to be lowered to 7% in the PIE
Information sharing
Greater integration of the production process with the business and technical management and control and with the firm's quality system.

Fields of science

Programme(s)

FP4-ESSI 2 - Software Best Practice initiative within the framework of the specific research and technological development programme in the field of Information Technologies, 1994-1998

Topic(s)

1.28 - Process Improvement Experiments

Call for proposal

Data not available

Funding Scheme

ACM - Preparatory, accompanying and support measures

Coordinator

ENGINEERING - INGEGNERIA INFORMATICA SPA

EU contribution

No data

Address

Corso Stati Uniti 23/C
35127 PADOVA
Italy

Total cost