The role of 'culture' in successful software process improvement

Software development takes place within a rich cultural setting. To be successful, a programme aimed at improving software development processes needs to recognise this context and to make explicit the software practices as they are actually understood and applied by software developers. But what aspects of the context are relevant and how can they be identified? To begin addressing this question we have been studying the adoption and evolution of software quality management systems using techniques from the social sciences to collect data from five organisations of different sizes. This paper reports on our experiences of a week-long study of one organisation. In this study, we aimed to uncover implicit assumptions, values and beliefs within the community which were affecting (positively or negatively) the adoption and evolution of their software quality management system. We discuss our approach, summarise our findings, and reflect on the techniques used.