Facilitando a aprendizagem organizacional em melhoria de processo de software

Abstract

Software Process Improvements are frequent activities in software organizations that are willing to increase the quality of their software products. Such organizations believe that software process improvements can serve as a way for improving software quality. Nevertheless, it is necessary to create strategies in order to establish the continuous process improvement and it is necessary to apply efforts in an adequate way. These improvements involve a lot of knowledge that can be new to software practitioners. Additionally, the process improvements need continuous learning by the whole organization rather than by only a few practitioners. Learning is a process to improve people’s actions through comprehension and knowledge, expanding the existing knowledge. The Organizational Learning composes a set of interactions between knowledge adaptation at the individual level (or subgroups) and knowledge adaptation at the organizational level. In that context, the research question that guides this work is: How can we facilitate the organizational learning in software process improvements? To answer our research question, we performed: (a) investigations in organizations engaged in software process improvements and (b) state-ofart investigations looking for empirical evidences regarding organizational learning and knowledge management. As a result, this thesis presents the definition of the KL-SPI (Knowledge and Learning to Facilitate Software Process Improvement) Framework. The KL-SPI framework assists in diagnosing and improving the organizational learning and knowledge management in software process improvements.