A Method for Instrumenting Software Evolution Processes and An Example Application

Introduction Typical difficulties faced by contemporary information systems organizations include: expending a majority of their resources on evolving legacy systems, having a large backlog of change requests to these legacy systems, and providing inadequate service to end-users and hence contributing to their dissatisfaction. Such a state of affairs reduces the ability of user organizations to take advantage of emerging business opportunities through Information Technology. Thus, there is an urgent need for information systems organizations to address these difficulties by improving their software evolution processes. A prerequisite to improving software evolution processes is the ability to instrument these processes. In this position statement we present a method for instrumenting software evolution processes within the context of improvement. The method builds on existing approaches in software engineering, namely the Quality Improvement Paradigm and the G/Q/M method [1]