Software process improvement in a research environment

Research organizations pay much attention to the quality of their work, but not always to the quality of the software they produce within research projects. This is not a healthy situation since research organizations are becoming more and more dependent on software development. This paper describes the results of a project on software process improvement at a Dutch research institute. The aim is to increase the technical quality of software produced by researchers and to increase the degree of control over the development process. This is done by developing guidelines, introducing tools and supporting researchers in the use of these products