Abstract:
We present a meta-model as a process maturity framework that can be effectively used to
identify the key practices to initiate and sustain a software process improvement effort
focused on a single process area. Our approach moves away from the overall software
development process and computation of maturity levels and focuses on a particular
process area or task and its key practices. In determining process maturity our
framework takes into account not only the process dimension but also the quality and
usability of the products or deliverables of the process. We demonstrate the applicability
of the proposed meta-model by generating key practices for several software process
areas and tasks including system documentation, quality assurance and configuration
management. We show that our approach is able to identify a complete set of key
practices to assess a process and generate recommendations that facilitate the
development of an action plan for the software process improvement effort.
