Although the Earned Value Management (EVM) technique has been used by several companies in various industrial sectors (software development, construction, aerospace, aeronautics, among others) for over 35 years to predict time and cost outcomes, many studies have found vulnerabilities, including: (i) cost performance data do not always have normal distribution, which makes reliable projections difficult; (ii) instability of cost performance indexes during the execution of projects, (iii) there is a worsening tendency in cost performance indexes when project approaches termination. This paper proposes an extension of the EVM technique through the integration of historical cost performance data of processes as a means to improve the project's cost predictability. The proposed technique was evaluated through an empirical study, which evaluated the implementation of the proposed technique in 22 software development projects. The proposed technique has been applied in real projects with the aim of evaluating the accuracy and variation compared to the traditional technique. Hypotheses tests with 95% significance level were performed, and the proposed technique was more accurate and more precise than the traditional technique for calculating the Cost Performance Index (CPI) and Estimates at Completion (EAC).

Software process performance analysis is a challenge for software organizations that aim to achieve higher levels of maturity models and quality standards, as it usually depends on knowledge of quantitative and statistical techniques, and experience with software processes and in the organizational context. This paper presents a knowledge-based environment proposed for supporting software organizations during the execution of process performance analysis. This environment aims to provide a body of knowledge and a set of activities and tasks for software process performance, which will be executed based on rules that guide the user during the execution of this analysis. The initial body of knowledge of this environment was collected and the set of activities and tasks was identified. The environment tools and their communication are also shown in this paper.

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.

Software organizations have increased their interest on software process improvement (SPI). In high maturity levels, SPI involves implementing statistical process control (SPC), which requires measures and data that are suitable for this context. However, this has been pointed in the literature as one of the main obstacles for a successful implementation of SPC in SPI efforts. This paper presents an instrument for evaluating the suitability of measurement repositories in order to support software organizations implementing SPC.

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.

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.

One of the main reasons why the development of software does not meet the client's need is the lack of understanding of the software's real objective, and consequently, the tasks it should perform and how they should be performed. With this assumption, we have defined a structure to represent the task knowledge which supports software engineers in understanding problems starting from the understanding of the tasks which comprise these problems. This structure combines task ontologies and problem solving methods, providing the developer with the necessary task knowledge to guide him throughout the development process. This article shows how task knowledge is defined and used to help the development of software, presenting as an example, use cases modeling.