The Impact of Feedback in the Global Software Process

A brief review of the difficulty of achieving major improvement in the global software evolution process introduces the FEAST hypothesis that this may be partly due to the fact that the global process is a complex feedback system. Results to date from the FEAST/1 project support this hypothesis and the laws of software evolution of which the first were formulated in the 1970s. The project is exploring the phenomenon in depth by modelling the evolution of number of industrial projects using both black box and system dynamics techniques. It expects also to demonstrate the impact of feedback on process behaviour and improvement. 1 Software Process Improvement In the 1950s digital computers were primarily viewed as tools for mechanisation of numerical computation. Since then the computing paradigm has advanced. Applications and their operational domains have been extended in their variety, the detail in which they are addressed and the extent to which the computer system is integrated wi..