Centre for Software Innovation

Foundation for Research, Science and Technology awards CSI $3.4 million grant for Software Process and Product Improvement project with NZ ICT companies

The Centre for Software Innovation has been successful in its bid to run a project on Software Process and Product Improvement, to be funded by the New Zealand Foundation for Research, Science and Technology. The project will run from 1stOctober 2007 for four years and will receive FRST funding of approximately $3.4 million dollars.

The aim of this research is to develop and apply a range of advanced software productivity techniques and tools to enhance the performance of the New Zealand software industry. The key focus is software process and product improvement using advanced, model-based software visualisation methods and tools. The New Zealand software industry is growing at a much slower rate than intentioned by the New Zealand Government/Industry High Growth and Growth and Innovation framework initiatives. Key reasons for this identified by international research and the ICT industry include: limited understanding by software developers of the complexity of their software processes and products; lack of a process and product quality improvement culture and matching improvement procedures within companies; and lack of knowledge, skills and time to adopt new techniques/tools to enhance product quality and process efficiency. Such reasons are not peculiar to NZ – it is a world-wide challenge for software companies.

This research programme includes top New Zealand researchers in software process and product improvement. We will undertake new research, extend international research, and apply that research locally in three key theme areas of process and project management improvement; model-driven engineering and executable specifications; and software imaging and visualisation. We will help NZ ICT companies significantly enhance their process and project management efficiency, and time-to-market, maintainability, and quality of their software products, reducing costs and increasing international competitiveness. Our aim is to ultimately realise large, measurable – 25-50% - process and product improvements for the NZ ICT companies we work with.

We will focus initially on a key process or product quality challenge identified for partner NZ ICT companies and will work with each company to identify improvement solutions for that issue by conducting new basic and applied research to develop improvement techniques and tools. Companies interested in participating in the research programme should contact Sarah Haydon s.haydon@auckland.ac.nz at the Centre for Software Innovation, http://www.csi.ac.nz.