Persuading developers to buy into software process improvement: a local opinion and empirical evidence

In order to investigate practitioners’ opinions of software process and software process improvement, we have collected a large volume of qualitative evidence from 13 companies. At the same time, other researchers have reported investigations of practitioners, and we are interested in how their reports may relate to our evidence. Thus, other research publications can also be treated as a form of qualitative data. In this paper, we review advice on a method, content analysis, that is used to analyse qualitative data. We use content analysis to describe and analyse discussions on software process and software process improvement. We report preliminary findings from an analysis of both the focus group evidence and four publications.