An experience report on decoding, monitoring, and controlling the software process

This paper reports on the experience in modeling the software process of a major business software producer located in Italy. The experience was conducted over a period of sixteen months, and was made possible by the European Community ESSI program (PIE no. 23699, DECO’). The modeling technique employed is object oriented coupled with activity based costing for process accounting. The baseline project used to model the process is the development of the information system for a large Italian municipality. The approach is innovative in that it empowers the actors of the process as process monitors, in addition to increasing their process awareness and 346 understanding. Moreover, it tackles the problems of a distributed organization, which involve not only internal synchronization issues, but also the lack of precise communication rules with the customer. The main results are three. Decoding the process gave developers and managers complete visibility of the activities in the project: this identified the communication problems with the customer. Monitoring the process allowed profiling the activities, improving them especially in terms of role interchangeability. Controlling the process was therefore possible in a unified way, where side effects of any control action become immediately visible.