ABSTRACT
Process improvement: The name belies its nature. Many people see it as the way to build products better, faster, and/or cheaper. In truth, there are many ways to be better, faster, and cheaper at whatever you are doing, and process improvement is only one of them. In addition, there are more aspects to process improvement besides just producing higher quality, quickly and efficiently. It is also important that we improve processes to make them more resilient. We will want to repeat and be able to build upon our success. Since software engineering is a labor-intensive process, we want to insure team stability when considering the changes that go along with improvement. We also need to include learning as a key element of process improvement to assure that we can reliably repeat our successes and not repeat our mistakes. We also must consider what I will call “externalities” in improving our processes. We want to be better, faster, and cheaper in ways that do not just pass quality problems or time considerations or costs on to others, either downstream along with our products or among others in our organization or in our business or community.
