Statistical Control of Software Process: A Systematic Review

Abstract

The Software Processes Improvement requires advanced techniques for the quantitative management process, so that from the analysis of the relevant indicators in the organization, actions can be taken to facilitate the decision-making process in favor of this improvement. Among the set of techniques, special attention is devoted to the Statistical Process Control (SPC), which has gained acceptance in enterprises preparing to attain high degrees of maturity in their processes, and require the establishment of measuring programs. SPC is useful in software development for several reasons. Control Charts help identify process shifts and abnormal variations. It is therefore pertinent to assess how successful SPC is in the context of software production. In this sense, we have not found any integrated proposal of quantitative management applied to distributed software development, processes that allow the attainment of important benefits, and, at the same time, that more organizations are improving their processes. These considerations motivate the need to define and carry out a Systematic Review to assess whether SPC is being used effectively and correctly, and to determine the main obstacles to a successful application of SPC in SPI efforts. Thus, the systematic review allows developing a rigorous analysis of the current state of the SPC, which is a starting point to address how it can be successfully used as a decision-making support tool in software-process improvement in agreement with the available empirical evidence reported in the literature.