Diffusion and infusion of software process improvements

Summary form only given. Software process improvement (SPI) leads to changes in existing practices. The changes are first adopted by the organization to form goals for individuals. The individual employee adopts the generally guided habits and processes as a member of the, organization. Thus, the adoption process happens both on the organizational level and on the level of individuals. In addition, we can see both diffusion and infusion as part of the adoption. This paper reports the experiences of SPI of Pori School of Technology and Economics and the participating small and medium sized software companies. The experiences show, that the University itself, as an independent organization, is well suited to organize an activity like SPIN, which in addition to the service structure expects the best practice transfer between companies, i.e. the activity tends also to create unofficial communication between companies. Sometimes the benefits of this unofficial process improvement are even more considerable than the benefits of an organized, official improvement.