The software development global market is opening its doors to more countries, giving small organizations an opportunity to benefit from more competitive conditions. A requisite for being competitive is to adopt internationally accepted software process practices. Small organizations trying to start their own effort must carefully identify how their environment affects an improvement initiative.

The authors report on the adoption of SW-CMM Level 2 in Link, a Chilean organization. This was a software process improvement initiative led by one of the authors. They explain Link's organizational environment, the initiative performed, and the factors that affected the initiative. They found a strong relationship between organizational environment and the initiative's success factors; specifically, that Link's small size helped the SW-CMM's adoption.