Software Development Process Improvement for Small Palestinian Software Development Companies

The purpose of this study was to develop a model for small Palestinian software development firms that will help them in making a self-evaluation for their software development process and find areas to improve. A large number of universities, research centers, and associations around the world have tried to find their own answers to this issue by proposing software process improvement models that are dedicated for the use inside small and very small software enterprises. However, the proposed solutions were still too complicated and cannot be applied easily by these firms and none of them represented a solution that fits all small firms. Moreover, all of these frameworks were built such that they fit the country from which the information was gathered. Accordingly and taking into consideration the culture context when applying western SPI models for the purpose of improving software processes, the researcher has introduced a simplified framework which he named PAL-SPI that offers an easy to understand and easy to apply software process improvement framework. A quantitative research methodology was used in this study. The survey was designed based on Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI V1.3) and a number of models that were designed for the same purpose in other countries such as Software Process Improvement Model for Small Organizations (SPISO) model. The data was gathered with the aid of an online survey. Forty surveys were sent to small software development firms in Palestine and thirty responses were received over a period of five weeks. The response rate was seventy five percent.