Resistance factors in the implementation of software process improvement project

Over decades, software model for improving the quality of software through management of the software process has became significant in the software industry. Many companies are now being assessed according to standards such as the CMM, SIX-SIGMA or ISO 9000, which have brought substantial profit to the companies that utilize them to improve the quality of software product. Several companies in Malaysia have been carried out software process improvement projects. However, a software process improvement initiative is still sometimes delayed, costs are over budgeted and some of them surrender before the project ends. Therefore, this paper attempt to analyze and identify the resistance factors which influence the implementation of the software process improvement project initiated by the company. This paper will serve as reference to the professionals in the area. In the other hand, it may also helping the other companies to manage future projects through the use of preventive actions that will eliminate or at least lessening the resistance factors’ consequences during the implementation of the software process improvement projects. This paper present a survey with 8 Malaysia’s companies around Kuala Lumpur and Selangor which have an experience in initiating and conducting software process improvement project. A total of 117 respondents from various background have participated this survey.


Introduction
Inspired by the efforts of Deming 6] and Juran [12], the software engineering community has realized that high-quality software development processes will produce high quality products. It has been generally agreed upon that, 'the quality of a product is largely governed by the quality of the process used to build it' [22].
The current focus moved from the work products to the organizations that produced the work products. Various software process improvement (SPI) models such as Software Process Improvement and Capability determination (SPICE) [11], BOOTSTRAP [24], ISO 9000 [20] and the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) [21] have been proposed to assist organizations to achieve more predictable results by incorporating proven standards and procedures into their software process.The research survey conducted in Brazil by Brietzke and Rabello in [3], there are many resistance factors influencing the implementation of a SPI project whereby some of the project implementations were delayed and cost overrun and some of them surrender before the project ends. This paper will look into the factors that influence the implementation of SPI project. It concludes with existing research that there are various resistance factors influence the implementation of the projects and this paper attempts to rank the resistance factors based on the research survey conducted in the state of Kuala Lumpur and Selangor, Malaysia. This paper is divided into 7 sections. The first section provides the introduction to the importance of having standards in SPI. The second section highlights some improvements of the implementation of SPI projects based on the reported previous study, while the third section discusses a set of hypothesis in relation to resistance factors in the implementation of the SPI. The fourth section states the methodology on conducting this research survey. The fifth section demonstrates the analysis of the survey result, while the sixth section provides ranking for resistance factors based on the analysis made on the previous section. The last section summarizes the main points of this research.

Software Process Improvements
Many companies are now being assessed according to de facto standards such as the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), SIX SIGMA or International Standards Organization (ISO) 9000, which have brought profit to the companies in improve the quality of software products.
Organizations that make use of the standards advocated in CMM, PSP, CMM-I, ISO usually show excellent improvements. For example, by 'improving its development process according to CMM "maturity", Hughes Aircraft improved its productivity by 4 to 1 and saved millions of dollars' [23]. Besides, Ferguson et al. reported in [7] that there is a schedule estimation improvement and strong quality improvements in the developed software when software engineering groups from three different companies, namely Advanced Information Services, Motorola and Union Switch and Signal using Personal Software Process (PSP) as their SPI model. CMM-I helps organization such as IBM Australia Application Management Services to help in reducing a cost effectively. In Malaysia, the most common SPI standards used by most of the software based companies are CMM-I, CMM, ISO-9000 and Six Sigma.

Resistance Factors in Software Process Improvements Projects
Based on software process improvement (SPI) literature, there are various factors which are influencing the implementation of SPI project. This paper has categorized all those factors according to Beecham's research [2] as presented by Brietzke and Rabello in their paper [3] and we broadly divided into 2 main categories which are organizational factors and project factors.

Organizational Factors
These are the factors which are related within the scope of the organization and are usually under senior managers' responsibility as presented by Brietzke and Rabello [3] and others as stated in [1], [2], [5], [19], [25], [26], [28], [29]. There are 5 factors which are categorized under organizational factors namely 1) human 2) political 3) cultural 4) goals and 5) change management as mentioned in Table 5 in Appendix A.

Project Factor
These are the factors which reflects the resistance factors on ongoing project which contributes and gives impact during the software process and it involves contribution from all level of personnel management as described by Wiegers [28] and others [2], [9], [27], [28]. There are 4 project factors namely 1) budget and estimates 2) documentation 3) quality and 4) tools and technologies as mentioned in Table 6 in Appendix B.

Methodology
The main objective of this research is to replicate the survey performed by Brietzke and Rabello [3], but in a different country, Malaysia. There are two main stage are implemented in order to conduct this research survey. The first one is data gathering and literature review and the second one is conducting a survey. For the second one,the key resistance factors are abstracted from Brietzke and Rabello [3] and deriving the questionnaires.
The resulting questionnaires were distributed to software companies which have been undergoing SPI project. 8 companies have been identified around the state of Kuala Lumpur and Selangor, Malaysia. From 160 of questionnaire that have been distributed, 117 of professionals taking part in this survey.

Survey Results
Survey results are described according to the section divided below:

Demography Information
This section presents an analysis of the profile of the respondents and companies taking part in this survey. The demography information has been organized in the first section in the questionnaires Table 1 demonstrates number of respondents according to their roles in the organization.

Resistance Factors
This section in the questionnaires cover the resistance factors that may influence and contribute to the delay or failure for the implementation of Software Process Improvement .The questionnaire uses the ordinal scale of 1 to 5, ranging from the least influential to the highest influential factor Table 3 summarizes the total of influence level score for each organizational resistance factor according to the formulae below:

Total Influence Level for the Organizational Resistance Factors.
T (f n ) is the total of influence level score attributed to factor (f). It is a sum of the score rated by the respondent multiplied by weightage score according to influence level.
n=1 R (f n ) is the score attributed to factor (f) as rated by the respondent according to the influence level W(f n ) is the weightage score attributed to factor (f) according to influence level as assigned in Table 2 f n is refers to the factor number.

Figure 4: Total influence level score according to organizational resistance factors
All the results gained in Table 3 are then plotted in a graph format as illustrated in Figure 4. It can be observed that the most top 3 organizational resistance factors are factor number 2 which is lack of adhesion and participation of all the individual involved in SPI project, followed by factor number 11 which is unrealistic expectation towards the SPI project and the third one is factor number 1 which is lack of commitment in all levels of the organizations. All these top 3 resistance factors are categorized under people factor as referred in Table 3. The three lowest of organizational resistance factors are absence of focus on the organization's most urgent needs., lack of expertise in implementing cultural changes and lack of professionals experience and skill. However, the total influence level score for all the factors are almost average with standard deviation of 32.2. Table 4 summarizes the total of influence level score for each project resistance factor according to the formula given in section 5.2.1. Then, the results gained are plotted as illustrated in Figure 5 below As illustrated in Figure 5, the total of influence level score for each of the project resistance factor is very close to each other with standard deviation of 29.7, not much different with organizational factors. It can be observed that the most top 3 project resistance factors are factor number 25, pressure and absence of planning concerning the adaptation period. Then followed by factor number 18 which is an excessive documentation and formality and then the third most is factor 21 which is involvement of top management in the relationship between the project teams and the person or group of quality assurance. Meanwhile, the three lowest of project resistance factors which are identify as factor number 17, 19 and 20 respectively.

Consolidation of the Results
Based on the analysis of the results reported in Section 5, total influence level score for both organizational and project resistance factors are being merged to gain overall results in order to determine the most and the least influence resistance factors.
According to the results survey, the most critical resistance factor is lack of adhesion and participation of the entire individual involved in SPI projects. This result is similar with the result gained by Brietzke and Rabello [3] and corroborates the research findings experience in SPI projects [1], [2], [25], [26], [27], [28]. The second most critical resistance factor is unrealistic expectation towards the SPI project. It is essential that clear expectations and goals need to be specified earlier, so that progress towards those goals can be continually monitored, and so that revisions to either goals, of processes, or both can be made persistently. The third most critical resistance factor is lack of commitment in all levels of the organizations. This factor is directly influenced by the size or hierarchy of the company, the larger size or hierarchy of a company, the more time needed to get a commitment from all levels of the organization.
All these top 3 resistance factors are classified under organizational factor as described in details in Section 3.1 which are related within the scope of the organization and usually fall under senior managers' responsibility. The results gained in this research is not much different with the results survey conducted by Brietzke and Rabello [3] whereby both human factors which are lack of adhesion and participation of all the individual involved in SPI projects and lack of commitment in all levels of the organizations give a big influence in determining the successfulness of the SPI project.
Meanwhile the 3 least resistance factors identified in this survey are lack of professionals experience and skill, lack of visibility about the ongoing software processes improvement project activities and lack of expertise in implementing cultural changes. However, the third least resistance factor which is gained in this research survey is opposed with results gained by the Brietzke and Rabello [3] where lack of expertise in implementing cultural changes is one of the top most resistance factors.
Besides, the respondents also mentioned that the schedule which is not planning-well and mix-up between software development schedule and SPI schedule is also affected the effectiveness of implementation of SPI project.

Conclusion
This paper has identifies and analyzes main resistance factors which influence the implementation of the SPI project specifically in Malaysian software companiesIt concluded that organizational factors specifically human factors playing an important role in determining the successfulness of the SPI project. Participation and commitments from all individuals across the organization are very important and required in order to support this good initiative.
One of the limitations is that this survey is nonprobabilistic, quantitative, and intentional and using a set of questionnaire in order to gather all data required. In this case, the degree of reliability and validity of the data is maybe applicable for only the companies taking part in this survey. However, it is believed that the instance of the scenario is not much different between the other states in the Malaysia. In further studies, the samples of the survey could be increased by conducting and repeating this research survey in other states of Malaysia, as a result, more overall picture and understandings can be gained about the implementation of SPI Project in the Malaysia.
Based on these findings, we expect that it may help other software companies to manage future projects through the use of preventive actions or proper planning which can reduce the resistance factors' consequences during SPI projects implementation. According to Abrahamsson without commitment from all organizational levels (human) to support SPI, the initiative will most likely fail or the results are not far reaching [1]. The experience of senior management with an SPI project will give positive impacts to the improvement process. Consultation support such as advice and training of SPI action teams and staffs is one critical aspect in ensuring the success of SPI project. Beecham et al. in stated that organizational issues (especially the human element) are important contributing factors to the success of SPI initiatives [2].
Lack of adequate training Lack of the establishment of organizational policies Political According to Wheeler and Duggins the political factor is important to the construction for a department to SQA [29]. The establishment of quality policy which is one of the political issues comes after the commitment of senior management. Quality policies and standards for SPI efforts describe the organizational goals and objectives related to the quality.

Cultural
Taylor and McGraw proved that in order to ensure success in a cultural change program, a champion who can build, deploy, drive, and own each initiative going forward must be properly decided [26]. However, every cultural change program requires good cooperation from both management and tactical technical staff; improvement programs will fail if either group is left out or underemphasized.
Lack of expertise in implementing cultural changes.
Lack of consistency between software processes improvement project and the organization's strategic objectives Absence of focus on the organization's most urgent needs. Goals According to Wiegers's research, if the goals, deadlines, and expected results by the managers are impractical, the effort towards SPI may be unsuccessful [28]. Clarke and Osterweil found a reason why software process needs to have indefinitely ongoing processes [5]. It is essential that clear goals need to be specified earlier, so that progress towards those goals can be continually monitored, and so that revisions to either goals, of processes, or both can be made persistently.
Unrealistic expectation towards the SPI project.
Insufficient and ineffective assessment of the current software process Existence of a software processes improvement project team not focused on orientation and technical support.

Change Management
Initial analysis needs to be conducted to determine whether the SPI initiative apt with the organization' objectives and interests. This is also discussed and supported by Statz et al. in [25]. Wiegers in conceived that the SPI project's team be used to actively facilitate the efforts toward changes on the part of the project teams rather than simply check the situation of the ongoing process in order to report a long and depressing list of findings [28]. Miler and Górski highlighted that in order to have a successful software process improvements, risk from configuration & change management which is not explicitly defined will lead to unsuccessful business process [19].
Simultaneous focus on many improvement areas APPENDIX B According to Wiegers lack of progress in improvement plans is frustrating to those who really want to achieve progress and this put down the importance of time and costs in the process evaluation [28]. Further research support by Statz stated that the senior management often overlook on the manageability of SPI project size issue and sufficient budget size for SPI project issue [25]. The first year is the most difficult period for a SPI program. Resistance to change will be at its peak, the costs are likely to be higher than in the 17 following years, and due to the steep learning curve, the first year goals and targets can easily be missed.
Lack of visibility about the ongoing software processes improvement project activities.
Excessive documentation and formality.

Lack of infrastructure and of a documentation management. Documentation
In SPI project, documentation is a must in order to provide proof and dissemination throughout the organization in a formal way. Therefore, it is helpful to have an infrastructure for documentation, since it is a mandatory practice throughout the organization. According to Beecham et. al , the documentation is also gaining importance in the list of problems associated to SPI [2]. It includes data measurement, proceedings register, coordination and management of the documentation, data collecting the operational framework forms the relationships and dependencies between what is to be done, by whom, and how to do it.
Lack flexibility in the use of the documentation in projects of different types and sizes.
Lack of involvement of top management in the relationship between the project teams and the person or group of quality assurance.

Quality
Quality refers to the state of the software as it was released or delivered to customers. In SPI, quality involves a good team management explained by Herbsleb et. al in his technical report ,is with a good procedural advice from professionals will lead to a good improvements of software quality [9 ]. In order to achieve higher level of quality assurance is by creating consent about how all the requirements definition processes has to be performed and which information should be provided to ensure the successfulness of the SPI project.
Lack of treatment to guarantee process conformity in instances of hiring and/or dismissal of skilled professionals.

Automation of not well-defined processes
Lack of training on the support tools and technologies defined as support

Tools & Technology
The problem associated refers to the implementation of new tools and technologies, amount of work and pressures that hinder the use of new tools. According to Umarji, complexity of SPI tools and technologies need to ease with which developers can adapt to changes in work practices caused by SPI [27]. However it has several acceptance issues because it often involves learning new technology, changes in work practices and an additional workload. Also, SPI involves collecting data about projects, resources and deliverables and often practitioners are not keen on sharing this type of data Pressure and absence of planning concerning the adaptation period.