Abstract The Software Process Improvement (SPI) Manifesto is based on three basic values: people, business focus and organisational change underpinning the philosophy of SPI. In turn, these values bring up to date certain SPI principles serving as a foundation for action in software development. The authors of this paper carried out a pilot expert validation of the sociocultural dimension of the sociocultural, technical, economic, environmental, political, legal, ethical and demographic analysis of the SPI Manifesto. Further, the authors report on the rationale and results of the pilot validation of both the survey instrument and the qualitative responses generated by the field experts, targeting to enlighten and reinforce the importance of the sociocultural dimension of the SPI Manifesto in research and development. The related literature review findings and the pilot research study strengthen this target. The pilot study with experts in particular provided stronger indications that the sociocultural dimension is considered of high importance by between 62% and 88% of the respondents, who were IT and computing professionals and software practitioners from academia and industry.

Abstract Literature on systems development has been progressively identifying the importance of social aspects in systems development. However, there is often a failure of participants in the recognition, and fulfilment, of ethical duties concerning the concepts of health, safety, and well‐being. A rational appeal can be made to normative defensible ethical rules in order to arrive at a judicious, morally justifiable judgement. In this paper, our first step is to report on the findings of a literature review, which presents the current health and safety issues concerning usage of computers in organisations and the workplace. Building on our earlier research on basic generic deontological and teleological moral principles and theories, we prescribe a set of moral rights and duties that must be exercised and fulfilled by stakeholders in systems development in order for them to exhibit moral behaviour. By identifying, and recommending a set of defensible moral obligations that must be fulfilled in the development and deployment of systems, protagonists—such as, project managers, software engineering teams, systems analysts, and clients—can fulfil their ethical duties, thus increasing the likelihood of deployed systems that are compliant with principles of health, safety, and well‐being of its users.

A survey has been designed to seek the practical foundation of base process activities (BPAs) in the software industry and to support research in modelling the software engineering processes. A superset of BPAs compatible with the current software process models, such as SPICE (ISO 15504), CMM, ISO 9000 and BOOTSTRAP, were identified for the construction of the questionnaires. This paper reports the survey findings on BPAs in software engineering processes. A summary of the current software engineering process techniques and practices modelled by 83 BPAs in 10 processes and three categories is given. Each BPA is benchmarked on attributes of mean importance and ratios of significance, practice and effectiveness. Based on the benchmarks, and by comparing with the current practice of the reader's organization, recommendations can be given on which specific areas need to have processes established first, and which areas should be highest priority for process improvement.

In the aviation industry, each aircraft is equipped with flight recorders. The scheme of this paper is that the same idea can be introduced in each copy of software. Once a software black-box mechanism is incorporated into a copy of a software product, the data used for software maintenance can be collected in real time. The software black-box information can be fed back to the producer at any time when needed, especially after the beta test period, when the software has experienced several crashes or problems, and before a new release. The analysis of the black-box data can provide information for software crash diagnosis and software usage maintenance testing