A Conceptual Model for the Selection of Methods for Software Engineering Process Improvement

Abstract

One way of improving the efficiency of system development is through the adoption of new methods. These, upon adoption, can provide the development team with the capabilities to address the current challenges. Once a team decides to follow this path, selecting which methods to adopt is a task ahead. The state-of-the-art provides a plethora of options. The criteria should be choosing methods yielding the highest net benefit towards the adoption goal. Many criteria influence the assessment of methods’ value. Knowing which ones are relevant and how they are related is essential to complete this task with excellence. In this paper, we propose a conceptual model describing elements of the decision-making process when selecting software engineering methods to be adopted by development teams. We aim to make explicit much of the knowledge involved in this process, i.e., mechanisms and influencing factors, to foster proper value assessment of methods. For researchers, our work can serve as guidelines to describe methods, for the industry, the model allows the comparison of assessment methods and better-motivated business plans.