Software industry is an important economic activity in industrial countries. Nowadays, the investment in this field is measured in millions of dollars. The Egyptian government has paid special attention for software industry in Egypt via providing it with a competitive advantage which makes this emerging industry promising.
For many years, researchers have developed several Software Process Improvement (SPI) models which are developed to fulfill the needs of large organizations, but they do not take the needs of small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) into consideration. SPI is a crucial task in SME due to scarce resources, small development teams, too costly services, and heavy workload. The paper works on SME to institutionalize process improvement practices, which aligns with Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) as one of SPI models.
This paper highlights and investigates, in detail, the problems and weaknesses that appear during CMMI implementation based on the current situation and characteristics of SME's in Egypt. In addition, it introduces a proposed conceptual framework which presents success factors about how small enterprises can more successfully manage SPI. The framework is suitable for SMEs to implement CMMI with better results in software projects, product quality, and customer satisfaction in order to put an end to the project overruns and failures. These factors will raise the level of Software industry in Egypt and will form their own core competing power. Consequently, it can participate in international competition.