Understanding Software Process Redesign using Modeling,
Analysis and Simulation

Walt Scacchi
Fluor-Scacchi Associates
Wscacchi@rcf.usc.edu

Software process improvement (SPI) has traditionally been focussed on addressing how to improve the capabilities of a software development organization through maturing and comparative benchmarking of its software processes. The Capability Maturity Model from the Software Engineering Institute is the most visible SPI initiative of its kind. However, the CMM is targeted to incremental improvement of existing software processes. The CMM top-most level, Optimization (Level 5), characterizes those organizations whose software processes are incrementally improved and refined through monitoring, measurement and reflexive analysis of well-defined and well-managed processes. Nonetheless, the CMM does not provide specific guidance or a maturity level that implicitly prescribes how to fundamentally rethink how to optimize software processes to achieve on the order of 10X improvement through radical transformation. Are radical transformations of software processes the same as incremental evolutionary improvements? Probably not, though they appear to lie along a common dimension or metric that characterizes the scale or scope of process change that is sought. As such, software process redesign (SPR) merits investigation to determine whether and how it might lead to dramatic improvements in process efficiency or effectiveness. Therefore, the study described in this paper seeks to introduce the topic of SPR and to describe how concepts, techniques and tools for software process modeling, analysis and simulation may be employed to support SPR studies.

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