Systematic Software Development: A State of the Practice Report from Germany

The speed of innovation and the global allocation of resources to accelerate development or to reduce cost put pressure on the software industry. In the global competition, especially so-called high-price countries have to present arguments why the higher development cost is justified and what makes these countries an attractive host for software companies. Often, high-quality engineering and excellent quality of products, e.g., Machinery and equipment, are mentioned. Yet, the question is: Can such arguments be also found for the software industry? We aim at investigating the degree of professionalism and systematization of software development to draw a map of strengths and weaknesses. To this end, we conducted as a first step an exploratory survey in Germany, presented in this paper. In this survey, we focused on the perceived importance of the two general software engineering process areas project- and quality management and their implementation in practice. So far, our results suggest that the necessity for a systematic software development is well recognized, while software development still follows an ad-hoc rather than a systematized style. Our results provide initial findings, which we finally use to elaborate a set of working hypotheses. Those hypotheses allow to steer the adaptation of our instrument in the future to eventually facilitate replications toward a more comprehensive theory on systematic globally distributed software development in practice.