Organizational Commitment Towards Software Process Improvement An Irish Software VSEs Case Study

This paper presents a case study carried out in very small companies which employees less than 25 people. This study concerns a company’s software development process especially in the issues of Software Process Improvement (SPI). SPI has gained increasing importance in software engineering. However recent studies show that the obligation and commitment towards SPI especially in small companies are very weak and not serious. This situation is usually related to insufficient resources either in term of financial, human and time in this type of companies. Therefore due to this situation, we would like to understand the current situation of Very Small Enterprise (VSEs) acceptance level towards SPI and the reasons are discussed. In this research we carried out a survey which contains open and close ended questionnaire in several Irish Software VSEs around Dublin, Ireland. A quantitative analysis; which using a statistical analysis, and qualitative analysis; which adopting the qualitative content analysis method have been adopted throughout this study. The results have indicated that the SPI initiatives in VSEs are done in a small scale, informal and indirect. In addition the results also indicate that commitment and involvement of peoples in the organization are high toward SPI.