Experimentation in software engineering represents a means to understand the impact of adopting software technologies. In this paper we describe an on-going experimentation work aiming at to address a real industry need in Brazil: the understanding of how performance variables (such as cost, productivity, and quality) are affected by the adoption of a nationwide software development reference model. The main strategy consists in integrating the application of carefully planned surveys into the model implementation and assessment procedures. Besides the expected performance results, we hope it can be useful to reinforce to the Brazilian software industry the importance of experimentation to support software technologies evaluation.

In the recent years, software products have increased in size and complexity, becoming a critical and strategic asset in the organizations' business. In this scenario it is a challenge to obtain software products of quality under the time and resources constraints established in projects. Standards, methodologies and techniques to promote software quality assurance have been continually proposed by the researchers and used by software engineers in the industry. The Workshop on Software Quality (WoSQ) aims at bringing together academic, industrial and commercial communities interested in software quality topics to discuss the different technologies being defined and used in the software quality area.

Brazil aims to achieve international standards on quality and productivity in the software sector. From 1993 onwards there are strategies and projects to reach the Brazilian objective on software quality. Since 1995 there have been nationwide surveys on software quality every 2 years. This paper highlights the main trends on software quality in Brazil based both on the results of four surveys (1995, 1997, 1999, and 2001) and on other pieces of evidence. The paper concludes that the software quality in Brazil is continuously improving.