Achieving sustainability: from innovation to valorisation and continuous improvement

The Software Process Improvement methodology plans and implements improvement activities to achieve specific goals, for example, increasing development speed, achieving higher product quality, and reducing costs. The approach paves way for the implementation of SPI innovations in software organisations. Innovation is the successful implementation of novel and appropriate ideas within an organisation. Innovation is underpinned by the concepts of creativity and invention. Often organisations, projects and individuals fail to gain adequate value let alone added value from their innovations. The term valorisation encompasses all activities that maximise the achievements of a project and innovation. The emphasis is on optimising the value of the project and innovation for diverse stakeholders (society, community, institutions, and individuals) and boosting its impact.
In this paper, the authors report on the understandings and collective experience gained over several years in industry as well as academia culminating in the design and implementation of the European Union VALO Project which dissemination and exploitation. VALO outputs include the elements of the training and online examination for possible certification to become Valorisation experts. The insights gained from the VALO project, enabled the development of a valorisation strategy which is used, alongside quality strategies to enable the development of a Quality and Valorisation of Projects Framework. The genericity of the framework provides the potential foundations for successful projects of high quality and maximises the valorisation of project and innovation results.
Software development projects (and projects in general) fail regularly. These quality failures manifest themselves in late deliveries, over-budget, not satisfying the users’ requirements and more importantly poor reliability. Quality attributes are system qualities (such as availability, modifiability, performance and security), business qualities, (such as time to market, cost and benefit, product lifetime and target market), and architectural qualities (such as conceptual integrity, correctness and completeness). Whenever any of these qualities are compromised a system can be considered a total or partial failure. Moreover, after a project’s completion, there is often evidence that it fails to deliver sustained value to stakeholders. In this paper, we examine the challenges and benefits of sustainability viewed from a STEEPLED multidimensional analysis.

This version of the article has been accepted for publication, after peer review (when applicable) and is subject to Springer Nature’s AM terms of use, but is not the Version of Record and does not reflect post-acceptance improvements, or any corrections. The Version of Record is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15559-8_53

Georgiadou, E., Siakas, K., Ross, M., Rahanu, H. (2022). Achieving Sustainability: From Innovation to Valorisation and Continuous Improvement. In: Yilmaz, M., Clarke, P., Messnarz, R., Wöran, B. (eds) Systems, Software and Services Process Improvement. EuroSPI 2022. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1646. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15559-8_53