Automated Process Quality Assurance for Distributed Software Development

As required or implicated in many process improvement or assessment models, Process Quality Assurance (PQA) is introduced to objectively evaluate actual software processes against applicable processes descriptions, standards, and procedures and to identify potential noncompliance. In a Distributed Software Development (DSD) environment, PQA is also an absolute necessity to ensure that each development site behaves as expected and high quality software is collaboratively developed. However, several problems brought by the distribution nature of DSD, such as different interpretations of standard processes among development sites, inconsistent criteria for identifying noncompliance, visibility into development activities of all sites being challenging, hidden conflicts or noncompliance for political issues within a site, substantial investment in setting up PQA teams in each site etc., can undermine the objectivity and effectiveness of PQA activities. To alleviate these problems, we introduce an approach in this paper that automates PQA activities for some routine checking tasks in a DSD environment. In the approach, a process model describing the actual software process is automatically built from each site’s repository and, then, the model is checked against logic formulae derived from a common checklist to detect noncompliance. Experiment results show that the approach is helpful to ensure that PQA activities in each site can be conducted according to the same guideline and the objectivity of PQA results is guaranteed.