An empirical study on the software process

Organizations have to track customer satisfaction and improve their software processes. Although a great deal of effort is expended in understanding what goes on within each of these areas, little effort has been applied to identifying and quantifying the relationships between the two. The objective of-this research is to discover and establish potential relationships between the quality of the software process and the software quality, applying the Hypothetico-Dedutive method The software quality is evaluated from customer satisfaction instead of consider all the associated attributes of a software product. The hypothesis to be tested in this study is "the improvement of the software process increases the quality of the software product". In this article, we describe an ongoing research project conducted in a bank and a software house situated in Portugal. This study uses two years of data to measure the correlation between 18 software process variables and 7 software process attributes. We used the SW-CMM software process model to evaluate the software process capability. Some of the available results allow validating the hypothesis previously formulated.