The impact of feedback in the global software process

After briefly reviewing the difficulties of achieving major improvement in the process of global software development and maintenance, software evolut ion, the paper introduces the FEAST hypothesis. This states that such probl ems may, at least in part, be due to the feedback nature of that process an d that this is, generally, overlooked in seeking such improvement. Results to date from the FEAST/1 project support the hypothesis and also the laws o f software evolution as recognised and refined over some 25 years. The proj ect is exploring the phenomenon in depth by identifying, modelling and simu lating the evolutionary behaviour of a number of industrial software projec ts using both black box and system dynamics techniques. It is now demonstra ting the presence and impact of feedback on process behaviour and improveme nt, and deriving guidelines for software process planning and management. ( C) 1999 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.