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The business operations are always under the influence of variations due to change in customer needs, market demands, internal processes and technology up gradation. These changes have direct impact on the performance of the processes cascading down to the quality of products/services. In order to mitigate the adverse effects due to the variations of the aforementioned, organizations need to understand the concepts of Process dynamics and process control. Among the various engineering domains, software engineering is very peculiar due to its dynamic nature of operations and variations in the process implementation. Software process dynamics refers to the factors affecting the processes over a period of time. Also, it is an approach to understanding how the behaviour of the software processes changes based on the impacts of external and internal factors.

The variations in processes are due to the factors affecting the process equilibrium; these factors are often not sensitive to the enforced process controls. Most of the times, it is quite possible that the controls are not adequate to minimize the effect of the factors causing the process turbulence and have not been tested for their significance before deployment. Making the processes to bear the impact of the variation without producing adverse effect on the performance is the key requirement for process definition. In order to establish rigorous control over the defined processes, a detail study and in depth investigation on the causes for the process variation needs to be done by the organizations.

This paper concentrates on theory of process dynamics and process variation including the importance of process controls to ensure the process equilibrium. This paper discusses the relationship between Process and Quality through formulation of a Process–Quality relationship (PQR) Matrix.

The intent of this paper is to describe and summarize the phenomenon of process variation and its impact on process capability. In this paper, it is demonstrated that the incremental change in process capability is time dependent function of process control and process improvement and this concept helps the process practitioners while proposing process improvement initiatives.

This paper provides an approach for designing of new processes and improving the existing process performance. Understanding about process variation and controls are useful in sustaining and improving process capability. Characterization of process variation discloses the pattern and nature of the variation which helps the process improvement teams in initiating improvement tasks. This paper expands the possible ways and means to define and develop the organizational process assets from Total Quality Management perspective. Juran Quality Trilogy concept extended and utilized in the proposed SDICC (Strategy, Design, Implementation, control and continuous improvement) approach for process management which helps process practitioners in formulating the quality oriented processes.

The focus of discussions in this paper is not on technical fundamentals of software programming or specific methodologies, but on the dynamics of software processes and mitigation of effects due to process variations. The intended audience of this paper are process practitioners and analysts in software engineering and people who wish to learn the advanced concepts of process improvement.