Adept – A Software Process Appraisal Method for Small to Medium-sized Irish Software Development Organisations

In this paper we describe the appraisal method that was developed by Lero (the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre) and Dundalk Institute of Technology (DkIT) to assess software processes within small to medium-sized Irish software organisations that have little or no experience of software process improvement (SPI) programmes. We developed a method, called Adept, through investigating the key factors that contribute to an effective software assessment method, reflecting the desires of Irish SMEs in terms of providing a “manageable” approach to SPI and through expanding upon the EPA method [1] to fulfil these objectives.