Practical process improvement meets DSP software development

The importance and effort invested in development of digital signal processing (DSP) software is increasing dramatically especially in telecommunication applications. Design of optimised mathematical algorithms has been dominating in research and product development, but as the size of software has grown, need for improved software development practices has emerged. Despite increasing importance, it’s hard to find any reports on practical results of improving DSP software development processes. In this paper we report the experiences of DSP-ACTION — a joint-project of Nokia and VTT Electronics — which is carried out at the Mobile Phones division of Nokia corporation. Objective of the experiment is to demonstrate improvement of DSP software development process to support reuse of not only source code but every level of design documentation. The improvement programme is based on prior assessment, which was done by using Pr²imer (Practical Process Improvement for embedded real-time software) framework. Measurements by using Goal/Question/Metrics (GQM)-approach are used to follow-up the improvement actions