Motivators of Software Process Improvement: An Analysis of Practitioners' Views

We present empirical findings from our study of Software Process Improvement (SPI) motivators in 13 UK software companies. Our analysis aims to provide SPI managers with some insight into designing appropriate SPI implementation strategies to maximise practitioner support for SPI. We identify what motivates developers, project managers and senior managers to be actively involved in SPI. We characterise motivations according to classic motivation theory. We find that most motivators are specific to a particular practitioner group with only a few common to all practitioner groups. Most of the common motivators are ‘rewarding', according to classic motivation theory. Finally we present findings showing that managers' perceptions of developer motivators are often highly inaccurate.