Onur Demirors and Elif Demirors

The mosaic of software industry includes a considerable number of small companies. In Turkey, for example, 69% of software companies have 20 or less employees [TURSOFT, 1997]. Similar observations are published for other European countries [Grunbacher, 1997]. Small companies usually provide customer specific solutions targeted for businesses or specialized parts of larger systems. It is very important for these companies to produce quality software since it will determine the quality of the business or the quality of the whole system. Although small companies are the majority and produce critical products, the software quality movement, during the last decade, has been large organizations generally and fail to address the specific needs of small organizations.

In this paper, we discuss difficulties of installing a quality system in small software organizations and provide suggestions for action. We base our discussion on our ongoing work initiated in February 1997 with the goal of installing an ISO 9001 compliant quality system in a software organization which has eight software developers. The smallness, the current process state, and the market the company operates in have raised a number of unique issues. To address these issues we have defined a model for process improvement based on the key process areas defined in CMM and the requirements and suggestions of ISO 9001 and 9000-3. We believe that many aspects of the problems we faced are universally applicable to small software organizations. We hope our model, which has produced promising results so far, can be generalized to provide the much needed assistance to small software organizations.