Assessing Software Processes over a New Generic Software Process Assessment Tool

Performing process improvement to deliver qualified products with the expected cost on time has been a requirement for organizations targeting to be successful in the software market. Software organizations usually perform process improvement based on well-known process assessment frameworks such as CMMI and ISO/IEC 15504. A number of derivatives of CMMI and ISO/IEC 15504 have been developed and they are being updated. As a result of this, the software process assessment tool based on them needs to be updated. Process assessment requires judgment and there is an unavoidable manual work. However, there are also opportunities for assessment automation. Therefore, there is a need for a generic software process assessment tool to define process assessment models and facilitate assessment. The existing tools do not meet the expected features of a software process assessment tool completely, as they have generally been developed for single process assessment models. In this study, we present GSPA, a generic software process assessment tool, which has been developed to support all structured process assessment models with its generic framework, facilitate assessment, support parallel assessment and present the reports in a well-structured way to the assessors. A multiple case study has been conducted to measure the sufficiency and the contributions of the tool

Tool support for software process assessments

Thesis Abstract Software process assessments are currently being conducted by organisations using de facto assessment standards such as ISO/IEC 15504, ISO 9001, CMM and BOOTSTRAP. These assessment standards require practical tools and support mechanisms to enable them to be effective and efficient in their execution. This thesis is a study of the functional composition of such automated tools and investigates the viability of creating mappings between the software process models that would allow the assessment data to be translated between models. The result is a model for creating automated assessment tools and a methodology for using data mappings to translate and compare assessment data between software process models in these assessment tools