(An) approach to tailoring and verifying software process

Abstract

Well-organized software process is prerequisite to good-quality software. Since certificated standard processes are baselines for software process improvement or quality assurance activities of a company, many international organizations and companies have developed several standard processes. These standard processes became more important after the pronouncement of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM). It is because the existence of organization-level standard process and its tailoring guide is essential for acquiring CMM level 3. In addition, many software acquirers compel companies to follow their standard process or international standard process in the software development. When a company uses a standard process for a project, it has to be tailored for each project. Unfortunately, most standards are described in natural language. Although they are described as clearly as possible, they can be perceived ambiguously. Since most standards are not described formally, there is hardly any systematic tailoring techniques for such standard process. However, a standard-compliant tailoring technique is essential for applying other processes based on the standard process, and for satisfying the acquirer`s need. Besides, tailored process has to be checked whether it has syntactic defects or not, and how much the tailored process preserves the dependency relations in the standard process. In this thesis, we propose a formal standard process module definition as a template process for tailoring, and introduce several tailoring operations to tailor the module compliantly. Also, we suggest conditions for checking process correctness and a metric for evaluating process compliance with standard. Through the proposed approach, a process designer can design a project-specific process by reusing or tailoring predefined standard process modules. In addition, he can measure the degree of standard compliance for a tailored process.