Software process management of top companies in Taiwan: a comparative study

In today's business environment, information technology (IT) is an indispensable tool for any corporation. One of the largest IT investments goes to software-related products and activities such as development, maintenance and enhancement. In order to reduce the cost of software activities and improve the quality of software products, effectively managing the software development process is an important topic in the IT field. Since the early 1990s, there has been rapidly growing interest in the capability maturity model (CMM) in software organizations. With the aid of CMM guidelines, a software organization can continually improve its software process. This research discusses the essence of CMM guidelines and surveys the IT organizations of the top 1000 business companies in Taiwan. It explores the status of software process management in these companies and compares the findings with Japanese and US data reported in the literature.