Qualitative Assessment of Software Entrepreneurship: Role of Standardized Software Process Improvement in Innovation and R&D

Abstract

Software entrepreneurship involves generating an idea of some product, development, testing, installation, release, marketing and finally monetization of developed product. The concentration of Software industry is on skill. Prior studies indicate that software companies face issues and quality gets compromised in creation of a first-rate software product which includes time sharing, monetary arrangements and allocations of resources. For high quality software products, conformance to Software Process Improvement (SPI) models however requires a lot of cost, time, manpower and has requirements to fulfil which are sometimes not affordable for the small enterprises or SMEs and quality gets compromised. For this purpose, qualitative research is carried out as the already existing literature does not riposte the problem specifically in the context of Pakistan to reconnoiter the innovation performances of software firms with reference the process and SPI used – mainly CMMI as known as Capability Maturity Model Integration. The research is exploratory in nature based on interpretivist paradigm. Semi structured interviews of software corporations of Islamabad were conducted using purposeful and maximum variance sampling techniques. Thematic analysis was later done using ATLAS.ti software for results and analysis. The in-depth research discovered that the firms following and trying to achieve CMMI levels or other high-level SPI are involved in delivering B2B services and products. Their products are implemented and used on large-scale – they are expanding their business and bringing continuous innovation. Almost all the firms even if they do not possess any SPI framework, were found to be practicing agile software development in their firms. Thus, for lightweights approaches such as Lean, Scrum, XP, Kanban, or Agile – SPI can be endorsed, and it could be an easy way forward for firms. The study conforms to previous studies that in order to achieve different maturities levels of CMMI, agile procedures can be equipped with for continuous product and process innovation. That will allow software firms to nurture and capitalize in particular knowledge xiii mechanisms while practicing agile software process for development. Henceforth, for the small firms which believe that CMMI is expensive and not practical for their business – differing to widespread belief – the compliance will undeniably aid them in preparing enhancements as they expand their business. The proposed research adds value to the literature of both engineering and entrepreneurial innovation. One prominent theoretic contribution of this research is merging the literature of software process models, improvement processes, resource, and knowledge-based perspective into one context and the in-depth understanding of involvement of SPI. The research is however limited to software industry only and the results are software business based. Future research can be carried out to assess if the company size and maturity could make it more prone to conform with SPI frameworks or not.