PRO-SOFTWARE: a government-industry-academia partnership that worked

We describe the experience of implementing PRO-SOFTWARE, a software quality collaboration project involving government, industry, and academia designed to bolster the software industry in Costa Rica by improving their software processes. We describe how the project was conceived, who the stakeholders are, explain in detail the main components of the project, and report the results obtained thus far from implementing software process improvement initiatives at three software companies. Particularly, we describe how a group of seven software quality engineers were trained to create a local consultant force within the country able to provide competent software process improvement services to the rest of the industry. Our experience demonstrates that collaboration between government, industry and academia in the software field can be successful if clear goals are established and a proven methodology is used to implement the project. We should interest organizations that want to implement software process improvement projects with limited resources.