Determining Organization-Specific Process Suitability

Having software processes that fit technological, project, and business demands is one important prerequisite for software-developing organizations to operate successfully in a sustainable way. However, many such organizations suffer from processes that do not fit their demands, either because they do not provide the necessary support, or because they provide features that are no longer necessary. This leads to unnecessary costs during the development cycle, a phenomenon that worsens over time. This paper presents the SCOPE approach for systematically determining the process demands of current and future products and projects, for analyzing existing processes aimed at satisfying these demands, and for subsequently selecting those processes that provide the most benefit for the organization. The validation showed that SCOPE is capable of adjusting an organization’s process scope in such a way that the most suitable processes are kept and the least suitable ones can be discarded.