The Human Dimension of the Software Process

Any model is an abstraction, a selective distillation of reality highlighting those features of the world which are relevant to the goals of the modeller. Presenting a partial view means, of course, that much of the complexity and detail of the real world is left out of the picture. Models of the software process, for instance, have been criticised for paint-ing an impersonal, technical picture of software development in which all traces of human presence (other than abstract role definitions) are expunged [Curt88]. But, of course, software development is carried on by people, and indeed many commentators have taken pains to stress that high performance depends decisively such “people fac-tors” [Cons93, DeMa87, Band95, Curt95].