Resumen
Some companies today are reporting increases in software productivity and quality as high as 1,000% using quality approaches pioneered in other industries. The goals of this special section are to offer guidance to those interested in learning about theses quality improvement approaches in software development, and to examine the payoff of software quality improvement efforts based on recent experiences. Many software professionals have found it difficult to understand and accept approaches like Total Quality Management (TQM), and then difficult to operationalize such approaches in their software development environments. Approaches to achieving high quality like TQM are difficult to understand because they are not simple toolkits, methods, or management theories; they are part of a complicated and encompassing quality paradigm. The concept of paradigm was introduced by Thomas Kuhn to explain the birth and growth of scientific disciplines. Kuhn says paradigms are broad and often fuzzy collections of idea, attitudes, values, tools, techniques, theories, approaches to solving problems, and example problem solutions, that characterize a scientific discipline and regulate the behavior of its practitioners.