With the introduction of UNIVAC in 1951, the US Census Bureau became the first statistical agency to enter the “computer age.” The resulting organizational structure has passed a continuing legacy. Many programmers had originally been trained as statisticians. They often were subject matter experts. Requirements writers often had considerable software skill. User specifications tend to be written in the language of equations, algorithms, and logic tables, while programmers used their skills to fill in the gaps. Everyone was accustomed to being able to make frequent “improvements” to the system. Myriad informal arrangements have been built up to work around the largely unworkable formal process.
Recently, the Census Bureau has established the goal of improving software process by implementing some of the key practices of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) for Software. The CMM developed by the Software Engineering Institute is a framework that describes the key elements of an effective software process. It covers practices for planning, engineering, and managing software development and maintenance, and employs an evolutionary improvement path from an ad hoc, immature process to a mature, disciplined one. It is the goal of the Census Bureau to evolve toward a culture that integrates software engineering and management excellence with survey research and computing.
The paper examines the existing culture, and its advantages and drawbacks. Understanding the current culture, determining what new behavioral changes are needed and setting the course for successful change is a difficult endeavor. The Census Bureau recognizes the need to change this culture in order to bridge the gap between business expertise and software process expertise required to manage organizational and technological change.
It discusses the general approach, some of the training, organizations, and management steps that we have taken to make the transition. It looks at areas of progress and challenges ahead. While the need for change is becoming increasingly accepted, the change process is only in its early stages. The paper will examine in detail the steps we have taken to improve the Census Bureau’s process of developing statistical software for use in its economic surveys.
The CMM software process improvement efforts required an initial resource investment in developing basic documentation of items such as polices, processes, procedures, plans, templates and requirements. In developing these items, we have had to be mindful of the limited management resources available. No one is available to do all the recommended management process steps and documentation of the full CMM process. It is the planning of the planning that has proven most interesting in changing the behavior of an organization with established culture and expertise. The program group established to manage the CMM software process improvement transition are following the principles of CMM by developing their own program plan, schedule, change control mechanisms, and success criteria. We determined what was required at a very high level. This planning of the planning (which we refer to, somewhat in jest, as Meta planning) and the lessons learned in implementing CMM will form the heart of this paper.
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