Abstract :
The speed of innovation and the global allocation of resources to accelerate development or to reduce cost put pressure on the software industry. In the global competition, especially so-called high-price countries have to present arguments why the higher development cost is justified and what makes these countries an attractive host for software companies. Often, high-quality engineering and excellent quality of products, e.g., Machinery and equipment, are mentioned. Yet, the question is: Can such arguments be also found for the software industry? We aim at investigating the degree of professionalism and systematization of software development to draw a map of strengths and weaknesses. To this end, we conducted as a first step an exploratory survey in Germany, presented in this paper. In this survey, we focused on the perceived importance of the two general software engineering process areas project- and quality management and their implementation in practice. So far, our results suggest that the necessity for a systematic software development is well recognized, while software development still follows an ad-hoc rather than a systematized style. Our results provide initial findings, which we finally use to elaborate a set of working hypotheses. Those hypotheses allow to steer the adaptation of our instrument in the future to eventually facilitate replications toward a more comprehensive theory on systematic globally distributed software development in practice.
