The successful implementation of Software Process Improvement (SPI) depends not only on the abilities of practitioners to identify processes modifications that may help to increase organizations capabilities to develop software, but also abilities to overcome barriers that can jeopardize the organizational change process provoked by SPI initiatives. The literature reports show that SPI practitioners must have experienced skills to overcome common social-cultural factors that pose as critical barriers for successfully implementing SPI. Nevertheless, there is no consensus in the area about what the critical success factors are for conducting SPI implementation initiatives. This work presents a study based on Grounded Theory methodology to acquire knowledge about SPI critical success factors. The main product of this study is a theoretical knowledge framework consisting of a set of inter-related categories grounded on a set of propositions that explains the phenomenon associated to the success of SPI implementation initiatives.

Customer satisfaction, quality improvement and rework reduction are known to be the most important benefits obtained through deployment of software process maturity models and standards within an organization. Since 2003 BL Informatica has been motivated and has established and maintained its software processes based on international standards (like ISO 9001:2000) and maturity models (like MPS.BR and CMMI). In spite of the lack of financial and human resources, the organization achieved satisfactory results. This paper describes BL Infomatica's software processes improvement plan, lessons learned, difficulties and benefits that where collected during the execution of the improvement plan. It also presents quantitative results that demonstrate the return on investment during these years.

The rapid deployment of high quality commercial technology often results in organizational reengineering. These changes reflect in different software engineering aspects, as the increase of software complexity. Within heterogeneous environments, due to the variety of users classes and their geographical distribution, a common understanding of the domain knowledge can be a hard task and would lead to a high uncertainty of the knowledge of real needs. User centered design methods along with knowledge engineering techniques proved to be suitable in such cases. This paper describes an evolutionary proposal for requirements engineering of a system to support the management of telecommunication networks. The proposal enhanced and speeded the software development, achieving a better acceptance of the system since the software group managed to efficiently acquire the organizational knowledge.