The Software Engineer: Skills for Change

dsb) has made more than 130 recommendations intended to improve the ability of software engi-neering organizations to produce high quality software on time and at cost, yet these organiza-tions continue to find it difficult to make these changes. If improvement were simply a matter of purchasing a new software tool, change would not be so difficult. But to realize the improvements called out in the DSB reports and others like them requires changes in the day-to-day practices of soft-ware engineers and their managers. Achieving these kinds of changes requires more skills than the ability to purchase a new tool – skills for change management become important. Unfortunately, too few of the soft-ware-intensive organizations are proactive about managing change. A recent article by Boehm and Basili shows that poor soft-ware engineering practices are still a major contributor to software defects [1]. While some organizations adopt new and better software engineering practices and tech-nologies because they recognize their strategic value, most organizations are more reactive than proactive. Reactive organizations are at the mercy of change led by others, and gener-ally attempt radical improvements in their software engineering disciplines only after customer pressures or disaster. By then, this catch-up game is costly and is often implemented by pick-up teams of individ-uals who may be well intentioned, but lack the change management skills to be suc-cessful. The most common result is money spent with little change to show for it. Change: What Past Studies Say Let us look in more detail at some of the past recommendations for change in th