Int J Softw Tools Technol Transfer DOI 10.1007/s10009-013-0275-0 REGULAR PAPER Assessing the effects of introducing a new software development process: a methodological description Agneta Nilsson · Laura M. Castro · Samuel Rivas · Thomas Arts © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013 Abstract In this article, we report from a 22-months long action research study in which we evaluate the usefulness of a set of software development tools in an industrial set- ting, a small software company. We focus on how developers in the industry use and adopt these tools, what expectations they have on them, how the tools can be improved, and how the adoption process itself can be improved. We describe these change processes from a methodological perspective, how we monitored the processes, how we reviewed the out- comes, and the strategies that we applied. We show how the processes evolved, intermediate results, and the steps that were taken along the way based on the outcomes. We believe that the described study may inspire other tool-developers and/or researchers to organize similar studies to further our understanding of the complex processes involved in the adop- tion of software development tools in industry. Keywords Software development process · Process improvement · Process change · Change assessment This research has been partially supported by EU FP7 Collaborative Project ProTest Grant Number 215868, and MICIN TIN201020959. A. Nilsson University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden e-mail: agneta.nilsson@gu.se L. M. Castro (B ) University of A Coruña, A Coruña, Spain e-mail: lcastro@udc.es S. Rivas Interoud SL (Formerly LambdaStream S.L), A Coruña, Spain e-mail: samuel.rivas@interoud.com T. Arts Quviq AB, Gothenburg, Sweden e-mail: thomas.arts@quviq.com 1 Introduction Introducing a new software tool or process is a decision that companies take with the expectation of improving their processes, their results, or both. This improvement is gen- erally considered in terms of e.g. quality, efficiency, and repeatability. Effects of change have been broadly studied and analyzed both from a prediction perspective (prior to change) and from an evaluation perspective (after change has been completed). However, for change to be successful, it is important to also reflect on the transitional effects in a change process. Transitional effects directly affect the out- come of a change process. Thus, monitoring and reacting to them, whether these are positive or negative, give the oppor- tunity to steer and redirect the process, potentially increasing the chances of success. Our work is based on the assumption that property-based testing (PBT) can benefit software engineering processes and improve software quality and development efficiency. Property-based testing is a testing-approach based on spec- ifying properties of the software under test, and using them to automatically generate and evaluate test cases [24]. We believe that PBT can help increase the competitiveness of software companies, and within a consortium of four uni- versities and four companies, with the endorsement of the FP7 European Programme [43], we developed a set of tools that implement a relatively new vision of PBT. While these tools seem promising, little experience exists on how they can be successfully introduced in industrial settings. To eval- uate the usefulness of these tools in an industrial setting, we conducted a case study [53] in a software development com- pany, LambdaStream, that introduced these tools along with a test-driven development process (TDD). The tools we introduce and evaluate are Wrangler [32], a refactoring tool; QuickCheck [3], a testing tool; and McEr- 123