What is Software Process and Quality Management? Elaborate its Importance in terms of Information Technology Companies to improve process and Quality?

Discuss concept of Quality Management and its Importance

Quality Management entails all the processes involved to ensure that the project delivers the need for which it was undertaken.Question 5Answera.yesb.agreec.nod.disagree

1. IntroductionIn recent years, the application of process engineering principles to different environments as a basis for increasing the quality and excellence in organizations is worldwide accepted. In this sense, general reference standards [1], international project management guidelines [2,3] and reference standards in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) context [4,5] promote that formal process management allows improving effectiveness and efficiency. This enhancement allows reducing costs, improving quality, and increasing the productivity and competitiveness of any organization.This approach is well known as Business Process Management (BPM) [6], and its application can provide many advantages (e.g. faster time-to-market, higher productivity and efficiency, better product quality and reduced product cost, among others) [7]. BPM can be and has been successfully applied to different companies and software organizations are not an exception.However, some difficulties in the software engineering context have been identified. For instance, Canfora compares Software Processes (SPs) with industrial processes [8]. This author identifies a set of features of SPs (e.g., SPs frequently evolve incorporating new lifecycles, SPs are complex and strongly influenced by unpredictable circumstances such as human work, SPs often need integration between frameworks and different technologies, etc.) and argue that BPM is usually applied by software companies to formally model their processes using formal notations. However, other aspects of BPM, such as the automation of SPs, are not usually approached because many software companies consider that these aspects include highly-complex tasks which could not be effectively automated with reduced costs [9]. In this context, the lack of automation of the process implies that each involved human role or work team perform the process execution manually and/or unilaterally [8]. This situation causes that monitoring, user-oriented execution, maintenance, and measurement of SPs could become difficult and expensive tasks.Considering this complex scenario, it should be very interesting to check software process models and predict their behavior in different situations to reduce the risk of their deployments (into production environments) and subsequent costs as much as possible. Although different approaches exist to deal with complex processes [10], even pursuing multiple objectives beyond risk [11], using simulation techniques on processes is one of the well-known techniques to achieve that [12].Simulation techniques help to understand and analyze processes for strategic management process improvement, forecasting or prediction, among others. The ultimate goal is being able of quantitatively estimate the impact of process design on its own performance. This research challenge has been traditionally addressed under the topic named Software Process Simulation Modeling (SPSM). This concept is originally introduced by Tarek Abdel-Hamid and Stuart Madnick who summarized their approach in their seminal book [13]. One of the most important factors to succeed in applying SPSM is to define a rigorous model that reliably represents the real system being modeled. For this reason, SPSM has been frequently perceived by companies as an “additional” cost to software projects slowing its wide adoption in the software business world. However, the number of publications related to this topic has been growing exponentially since [13], because simulation helps assess solutions to real situations in a virtual world, giving the opportunity to know the consequences within a risk-free environment.As mentioned before, SPSM is a topic that has been studied by the community since 1980. In fact, over the last decades, multiple contributions have emerged in the research literature on SPSM and each of them has its own particular proposal. There are different reviews and surveys on SPSM [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], [22], but it has not been possible to find current and formal reviews that provide a complete view on SPSM of the last five years. In addition, previous reviews do not categorize SPSM proposals under study according to their nature or Knowledge Area (KAs) within the field of Software Engineering (SE).This paper aims to fill this gap by performing a systematic review to identify trends and directions for future research on SPSM after studying which proposals in this topic have been defined and the relationships and dependencies between these proposals in the last five years. Therefore, this Systematic Literature Reviews (SLR) contributes in four ways to ongoing research in the field of SPSM: (i) showing and reviewing the most widely common SPS paradigms that have been used from 2013 to 2019, as well as the methods or techniques that assist the SPSM; (ii) summarizing which purposes that have been addressed by SPSM; (iii) creating a paradigm-based taxonomy to classify software simulation proposals; and (iv) offering trends for future research. All these aspects will be addressed in this paper following meticulously Kitchenham's method [23], as it is described in the following sections.Finally, this paper is structured as follows. Related works are briefly described in Section 2. Later, Section 3 and Section 4 describe the method used for the systematic review and its planning, respectively. Once decided how the SLR is going to be performed, the review protocol whose results are presented in Section 5 was conducted. Section 6 offer analysis and discussions on these results and Section 7 presents conclusions, open issues and future works.

What is the primary goal of process improvement?Enhancing employee satisfactionMaintaining status quoImproving product qualityIncreasing bureaucracy

Explain Software Process activities.