ABSTRACT
Software has become a competitive factor in the market for companies in the software business and for any other organization because of the pervasiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) embedded into almost any commercial product or process. Most of the organizations have now become “software intensive.” When any organizational asset enters in the “critical success factors club” of a competitive market, it is doomed to be observed at an X-ray level. In addition, the difficult global economical situation of recent years has led private and public organizations to look for a major cost and time efficiency in the ICT field maintaining or even increasing the expectations in terms of quantity and quality of software products required. These pressures have raised a project’s risks and consequently increased the already high rate of unsuccessful projects to an unacceptable level. Nevertheless, the new customer expectations are not avoidable anymore and the supplying organizations must face the goal of improving the management capabilities of software development and maintenance processes in a transparent and measurable way.
