Tailoring the software process to project goals and environments

This paper presents a methodology for improving the software process by tailoring it to the specific project goals and environment, aimed at the global software process model as well as methods and tools supporting that model.

Abstract

This paper presents a methodology for improving the software process by tailoring it to the specific project goals and environment. This improvement process is aimed at the global software process model as well as methods and tools supporting that model. The basic idea is to use defect profiles to help characterize the environment and evaluate the project goals and the effectiveness of methods and tools in a quantitative way. The improvement process is implemented iteratively by setting project improvement goals, characterizing those goals and the environment, in part, via defect profiles in a quantitative way, choosing methods and tools fitting those characteristics, evaluating the actual behavior of the chosen set of methods and tools, and refining the project goals based on the evaluation results. All these activities require analysis of large amounts of data and, therefore, support by an automated tool. Such a tool — TAME (Tailoring A Measurement Environment) — is currently being developed.