Establishment of a national benchmark of software engineering practices

Software engineering process benchmarking is one of the important methodologies in software process assessment and improvement. In collaboration with IBM, IVF has conducted a Swedish national benchmarking survey to derive a national benchmark of software engineering practices in the Swedish software industry. This paper describes the design of the survey and the derivation of the national benchmark of software engineering practices. The Swedish national benchmark is contrasted with the IBM European benchmark. General findings of the survey are highlighted. A new benchmark-based software engineering process improvement approach is proposed for both the Swedish and international software development organisations for working smarter in software development and software project organisation.