Benchmarking European software management practices

Reviewer: Richard A. Baker

Dutta et al. describe a survey they carried out to compare the software process activities performed in various European companies. The survey consisted of a questionnaire sent to 463 companies in 17 European nations. Each company was asked to respond to 42 yes-or-no questions on software process practice in the areas of organizational structure, standards and procedures, metrics, control of the development process, and tools and technology. The results of this survey are analyzed based on the nationalities of the companies. This paper is of minor significance, for a number of reasons. First of all, it relies on the assumption that there is a significant difference in corporate cultures between these nations. In an age of multinational companies with multinational software development projects, the melding of cultures cannot be discounted without significant discussion. This paper does not discuss this subject, nor that the European Union allows engineers to work freely in different countries and that the location of a company in a given country does not mean that the engineers or managers who set the software practices are from that country. Third, this survey only considers the existence of a practice within a company, not the adequacy of that practice. Furthermore, the way that software practice surveys are answered depends more on the person answering the questions than on the practice. Hidding discusses the differences between the perceived level of a practice and the actual practice [1]. The authors should have validated at least a few of the answers to verify that there is a good correlation between the survey answer and the actual existence of these procedures in each nation. Without this verification, they cannot show the validity of their study.