Managing CASE introduction: Beyond Software Process Maturity

Many software organizations face serious problems in their attempts to make expectations and realities meet in introduction of CASE technology. One promising and substantial approach to understand CASE introduction better and to provide guidelines for how to manage it more effectively has been developed by Watts S. Humphrey, Bill Curtis, and others. By relating CASE introduction to software process maturity they have provided a rich framework, both for analyzing and understanding the complexity of the implementation process, and for designing and managing specific implementation efforts. This paper reviews software process maturity as a framework for CASE introduction. The relevance of the framework is discussed and three critical questions are explored: 1) How do the specific characteristics of CASE technology influence CASE introduction? 2) How does the organizational environment influence CASE introduction? 3) What is the role of organizational experiments in CASE introduction? The aim of the paper is by way of this discussion to explicate the strengths and limits of software process maturity as a framework for CASE introduction, and to identify the most important supplementary issues.