373 Implementing a people focused SPI programme Nathan Baddoo, Tracy Hall, David Wilson Abstract Software Process Improvement (SPI) has become the most popular approach to delivering improvements to the software product. Based on statistical process control, the underlying theme is that by understanding and defining the current state of a company’s software development processes, quality practitioners and managers can sufficiently determine and control areas within the development process to achieve improvements in the product. We support this general approach to SPI. We also believe that the people factors in SPI implementation are vital. We believe that to achieve greater success in software process improvement initiatives, greater attention needs to be paid to the perspectives and attitudes of software practitioners. However, we believe that different groups of practitioners have different experiences and attitudes towards SPI. We present preliminary evidence from our study of UK companies. We present the obstacles and motivators to successful SPI from the perspective of three groups of practitioners: strategic management, operational management and grassroots level practitioners. We find that grassroots practitioners believe that SPI generates increased workload due to the amount of documentation required by current models. We also present evidence of positive influences and motivators to SPI that we have come across in companies. We find that giving practitioners ownership of the processes to be improved encourages them to be more responsive towards the improvement programme. We draw together the common issues in the study and argue that time, financial commitment and practitioner buy-in are critical to the success of SPI programmes. 1. Introduction Software process improvement (SPI) is an approach to software product improvement achieved through making improvements to the development process. SPI is currently very popular and leading models like SEI’s CMM [7] and ISO’s SPICE [8] appear to be at the forefront of this approach. We support the concept of SPI and believe that process improvements do indeed lead to better quality software. We also believe that the perspectives, experiences and general attitudes of practitioners towards SPI programmes significantly influence the success of these programmes. We believe that to achieve greater success in SPI initiatives, more attention needs to be paid to such practitioner factors. However, we suspect that companies are overlooking such critical people management factors when they implement SPI. Over the past year, we have been conducting studies in a number of companies with groups of software practitioners about their views, perceptions and experiences of software process improvements. This is part of a three year project on SPI 1 . In this paper we present preliminary findings from this research project. In this project, we follow up on work that we have done previously in the area of assessing practitioner attitudes towards software quality improvement initiatives [4], [10]. In this paper we focus on the views of three groups of practitioners: strategic management, operational management and grassroots level practitioners. We have identified in earlier work that there is misalignment in the perspectives and attitudes of these separate groups of practitioners towards SPI programmes [4]. We have undertaken to propose approaches to 1 This project has been funded for three years by EPSRC under grant number EPSRC GRL/991962