Software process improvement by example (SPIE)

A software process engineer is employed to help improve the software development practices of an organisation. For small scientific software projects, software engineering process improvement by example (SPIE) has a number of benefits. By actually enacting some of the software development processes, the software process engineer can easily engage, gain and retain access to projects, spend more time interacting with project members, gain an inside insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the software development environment, develop and trial appropriate new practices, tools and methods, and reduce the overhead to the project of software process improvement efforts. The example of the software process engineer can initiate changes to the software development culture of the team members. Real project, producer and process artefacts and data can be produced which are relevant and persuasive learning examples for the team members, other software developers, and other projects in the organisation, thus extending the benefits beyond project boundaries.