Software Production: From Art/Craft to Engineering

Software-development organizations throughout industry are striving for better ways to develop, deploy, and maintain their products. Changing an organization's well-established operating procedures — to improved methods and techniques — is always a substantial challenge. But, quite often, change is crucial for maintaining competitiveness and ensuring long-term success. This paper analyzes the challenge, and identifies key elements of a typical migration path to creating a new operating paradigm. The paper also provides a framework for technology insertion, a methodology that helps develop a disciplined engineering process, allowing software projects to advance systematically in their journey to success. Experience with the AT&T mosaic of integrated software processes, known as MOSAIC, and the software-development environment (SDE), shows how MOSAIC and SDE support project teams undergoing organizational change.