Project Aurora: dawn of a new way

Project Aurora is an effort underway at Bellcore to reengineer its software development process to reduce lifecycle time and cost while increasing customer satisfaction. Our project began with a focus on the requirements engineering process, but this scope quickly expanded to include many aspects of software development. We are implementing recommendations in four general categories: customer interaction; prototyping; software reuse; information management. The paper describes the problem assessment and analysis that led to these recommendations, along with the lessons we have learned to date about how to effect change in software development organizations.