COTS developers lead best practice adoption

As part of the Australian National Industry Improvement Programme, a software development 'best practice' survey was conducted in Queensland. The questionnaire was adapted from the European Software Institute's (ESI's) Best Practice Questionnaire and the preliminary findings from Queensland are compared with the ESI's 1997 results. This paper explains the background and aims of the study and the execution of the survey, and presents some interesting findings related to levels of adoption of best practice. Analysis of the 205 responses revealed that the leaders in best practice adoption are organisations involved in developing commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) systems. A comparison of the use of software engineering practices is made between COTS and non-COTS developers.