Analyzing modularity properties of the software process using activity based costing and management

“What can we do to solve the software crisis?”: this question is always present when we read an article about the software production mechanisms or when we hear a conference on software development issues. But is it true? Is this the right question? Software industry is still young, but it has undergone an incredible growth. Nowadays computers mark our daily life and software applications support us in most of our activities. Probably no one other product has had a diffusion comparable to that of computers in the technology age. But then, where is the software crisis? The “software crisis” is usually defined as a set of problems that afflict the software industry. The poor quality of software products perceived by users and the software projects which often do not respect estimated schedule and budget are only two of the visible aspects of this crisis. In general we can say that the software industry seems to be unable to satisfy the requests of the market: products capable of specific functionality with a service quality as requested by users and respecting time and cost constraints imposed by the market. Two aspects play a central role in this situation: on the one hand the software industry is generally speaking not ready to cope with this situation, on the other hand the demand for new applications and services with high quality parameters is ever growing. In this context a young industry is trying to cope with this ever increasing demand with a development process that is not yet suited and sufficient mature: this is a chronic situation., Probably there is no ‘silver bullet’ to solve all the problems of software firms, but it is surely possible to enhance the response of these firms to the market demand. Many are the factors that have to be considered for enhancement, but first, most of the software industries lack a mature and formalized development process, and this is indicated as one of the crucial factors for improving the production capability and quality of firms. Many different process models have been defined and proposed to software organizations, such as the Capability Maturity Model, but these models are facing resistance for their introduction and adoption. The software process is massively based on the skill and experience of many persons, and this is one of the condition that differentiates it from manufacturing development, thwarting the adoption of sound and engineered process schemes. The purpose of this work is to present a framework for monitoring the organizational performance in order to support the introduction of a formal software process model and to foster its continuous improvement. This is achieved through the use of a measuring and analysis technique centered on the activity structure of a organization, named Activity Based Costing. In chapter 2 it is presented a technique for measuring and monitoring the activities undertaken during the development of a product. In chapter 3 we show how it is possible to apply this technique to the software process in a structured measuring and monitoring program. Chapter 4 gives a perspective on the use of ABC data for the improvement of the software process. Chapter 5 concludes this work with some conclusions and considerations concerning the benefits and the cost of ABC.