Comparative Analysis of light weight practices for SPI in small and medium software organizations

Software process improvement (SPI) is typically one of the most significant areas considered by Software industry when boosting the whole efficiency of its business processes and practices. Implementing SPI helps achieve objectives such as speed growth, product quality or cost reduction and to identify shortfalls in the software development cycle and fix them in a better way. In the industry, different models for improving software processes are used including CMMI, PSP, SPICE, MSF, RUP, ISO etc. All these models consist of a very comprehensive set of practices and to follow all these practices is quite expensive for the companies. These models have significant advantages, but it is hard for small and medium businesses to use them because of their expense. However, in literature there are some lightweight practices for those software organizations that cannot afford the expensive ones. In this research, we performed a comparative study on customized software engineering process (CSEP) and lightweight practices (LWP) proposed in literature on industrial software projects. The objective is to study which of these practices are effective if performed by an organization. We also measure which of these practices give better defect rate, delivery, schedule deviation, and performance. The comparison on a software project shows that the lightweight practices have improved defect rate, delivery time, and productivity.