Software Process Improvement and Knowledge Management

Faster, better and cheaper are challenges that IT-companies face every day. The customer's expectations shall be met in a world where constant change in environment, organization and technology are the rule rather that the exception. A solution for meeting these challenges is to share knowledge and experience - use the company's own experience, and the experience of other companies. This may seem self-evident, but experience shows that a lot of people struggle to get started.

SINTEF ICT has considerable experience working with process improvement and knowledge management for many years. We collaborate both with universities (e.g. NTNU and Univ. Oslo/Simula Research Laboratory), public sector, and industry, for example in the Norwegian national projects SPIQ, PROFIT, Inter-PROFIT, and SPIKE, and in the EU projects like PERFECT, TELMET, and QIS. The focus of these projects has been empirical studies of process improvement, organizational learning, and knowledge management in ICT organizations. The information and dissemination of results from these projects has been in the form of numerous books, journal articles, and conference proceedings. For example, the book “Process Improvement in Practice - A Handbook for IT Companies” published by Kluwer, is designed specifically for small IT companies who wish to start with systematic improvement.

At the international arena we are member of the International Software Engineering Research Network (ISERN), which is the leading empirical research community within software engineering and learning software organizations. We are also member of the leading industrial process improvement network, International Software Consulting Network (ISCN).