Assignment: Software Systems Engineering Process

Project Background

Throughout this project, you will be working on several aspects of software development process improvement that will result in a complete Software Development Process Improvement Plan for a hypothetical organization of your choosing. You will not be developing any software, but you will work extensively with the concepts of good software development processes.

Project Selection

The first step will be to select a hypothetical organization and software category for your Software Development Process Improvement Plan. Examples would be a company that develops its own software for internal use, a company that develops software for external sale, or a company that provides contractual software development. This organization will be used as the basis for each of the assignments throughout the course and should conform to the following guidelines:

Nontrivial: The selected organization should be large enough to allow reasonable exercise of the software development processes you will identify.

Domain knowledge: You should be familiar with the organization or software category to allow focus on the software development processes without significant time required for domain education.

Accessibility: You should have good access to the people and other information related to the organization or software category because this will be an important part of the process improvement.

Select an organization and software category that fits these requirements

The proposal should be a document of approximately half a page, with enough detail to explain the hypothetical organization and software category that you have chosen.

Assignment Description

For the assignments in this course, you will not be implementing the actual project, but rather, you will be developing a comprehensive Software Development Process Improvement Plan document. Your first task in this process will be to select a company and software category to use as the basis of your design.

The project deliverables are as follows:

Proposal for company and software category to instructor for approval (1/2 page)

Software Development Process Improvement Plan shell (document detailed below)

Title page: Should include course name and number, project name, student name, and date

Table of contents: Auto-generated, in a separate page and should be updated in each phase

Section headings (create each heading on a new page with TBD as content except for sections listed under "New content" below)

Project Outline
Process Improvement Background
Best Software Practices for Process Improvement
Metrics and Measurement Process Improvements
Software Quality Assurance Process Improvements
Risk Management Process Improvements

New content (needs to be filled)

Project outline (1 page)
Identify the company and category of software developed.
List process improvement goals.
Material can be taken from the approved proposal submitted to instructor.
Be sure this project is approved by the instructor.
Process improvement background (2-4 pages)

Research current industry-accepted software development process improvement methods.

Choose the methods that you will use to guide your process improvement plan and justify your selection

Describe background material from your choice of industry-accepted software development process improvement methods.

Best Software Practices for Process Improvement

Be sure to update your table of contents before submission.

Document needs to be formatted according to APA guidelines.