• Requirements engineering

• Design and implementation

• Quality assurance

• Team organisation

• Software maintenance

Target Areas and Specific Goals

SMM focuses on five target areas (TAs) that have been found to be essential for successful software development, addressing also the GÉANT specifics. Further, each TA includes several specific goals (SGs), which are individual concerns within them.

Requirements engineering

Identification and overall management of stakeholders

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Requirements are validated by stakeholders whether they properly reflect their needs and expectations.

Design and implementation

The technical governance the activities that are usually associated with software design, development and delivery; the relevant practices, elements of development environment and tools used by software developers.

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• Issues are managed without applying an established framework and best practices.
• There is a process for issues with categorization and handling through a defined workflow.
• There are clear and uniquely assigned responsibilities.
• Issue resolution performance, outcomes and times are tracked and analysed.
• There are management and maintenance of issue categories, attributes and workflow.

Quality assurance

Quality assurance activities provide a general and integral quality-focused perspective, across all target areas and shared concerns such as maintainability, reliability, security… It is focused on the delivery of a quality system, based on the established requirements and specification with the stakeholders. It should be considered early and embedded into requirements, planning, design, costs, internal culture, ethics, managerial approaches and incentives for the team members. It should make sure that the agreed parameters of quality remain in the focus of the development team and are the subject of tracking and evaluation. Quality assurance should also build assurances and controls for the software and processes that document them and ensure that quality-related claims are satisfied.

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• Review and optimizations of the process.
• Review and improvement of testing and verification procedures.
  
• Extract and capture knowledge.
  
• Review related practices for further optimization and improvements.

Team organisation

Team skillset management

Team members' skills and knowledge are known, used, improved in line with the needs of the work, and spread to others.

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• Use of agreed communication channels and planning and coordination tools
• Teams are effectively aligning the planned work with available resources and time and adapting to disturbances or more precise needs.

Software maintenance

The focus of the software development team is proper planning and validation of the changes that will be conducted within maintenance, as they are additional concerns that are not directly related to software development. The issues are sometimes resolved with explanations, use of alternative paths or workarounds.

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