Improving quality and cost-effectiveness in enterprise software application development : an open holistic approach for project monitoring and control

The availability of integrated software tools can help organizations to easily and quickly achieve higher maturity and capability levels in process improvement and change management initiatives, by effectively supporting easy data and information sharing. However, despite their usefulness, their implementation costs still often represent a not trivial constraint for their adoption. In order to overcome such constraints, Open Source Software (OSS) can represent the right solution. Among the plenty of OSS freely available on the Net, only a very reduced set deals with measurement and monitoring & control processes, which instead represent two core processes in well-known SPI models. This paper proposes a case study showing how to efficiently detect possible project improvements using a combination of software engineering measurement-related techniques supported by the OS platform Spago4Q, keeping the focus on the need of organizations to strengthen its historical data gathering process.