Desing of High Performance Organizations Applied to Software Development (dissertation)

This dissertation analyses the possibility to apply a new approach of organizational design to the field of software engineering. The goal of this new approach which was invented at the Technical University of Graz is to build a high performance organization through a cascade of value adding business processes. At first the term software organization is defined and typical problems of software development are investigated. The next question is how much influence organizational design can have on the performance of a software organization. Major restrictions are the special characteristics of the product "software" and the fact that there is only a development process and no manufacturing tasks. After a critical analysis of existing concepts for improving the software process the new organizational design approach is transferred to this special kind of organization. Division of work in software development is discussed in various dimensions. The software process can be divided in three levels of abstraction, a customer layer, a system layer and a component layer. Several variants of this generic process model are compared. Advantages and limits of the new approach in the field of software engineering become clear in the final discussion.