SUMMARY For the effective promotion of software process improvement (SPI) activities in a large organization, it is necessary to establish an organizational structure and a deployment method for promotion and to develop training courses, support tools, and other materials. Even if an organizational promotion system is established, the SPI activities of each development department cannot be promoted effectively without an SPI community. To promote SPI activities throughout Toshiba Group, we organized a Corporate Software Engineering Process Group in April 2000. We also proposed an SPI framework. This framework extracts the features of organizations in which improvement activities were successful in the 1990s and combines them systematically. For over 10 years, we have been constructing Toshiba's SPI framework based on the SPI framework that we proposed and promoting process improvement activities using it. As a result, maturity levels were improved in many development departments, and the applicability of the SPI framework has been confirmed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

It is very important to improve software quality using program analysis and measurement tools and the SQA (Software Quality Assurance) method at the appropriate points during the process of development. In many development departments, there is often not enough time to evaluate and use the tools and the SQA method or to accumulate the know-how for effective use. This paper describes the support activity of a software quality analysis and measurement service which is performed by our laboratory team within the company as a third-party independent staff group. We call this activity HQC (High Quality software creation support virtual Center). The purpose of this activity is as follows. First we improve the software quality engineering process in the development department, for example, we help them to increase efficiency of review or testing. To accomplish this, we use program static analysis tools to detect fault-prone software components. Next we assist in starting their own self-improvement process. In addition, we provide service activity to many development departments concurrently. We have been making progress with these activities, and some development departments have begun to establish improvement processes themselves.