Competency Assessment: Integrating COCOMO II and People-CMM for estimation improvement

‘Human factor’ is one of the most relevant and crucial aspects of software development projects management. Aiming at the performance improvement for software processes in organizations, a new model has been developed to diagnose people related processes. This new model is People-CMM and represents a complementary solution to CMM. On the other hand, existing estimation models in Software Engineering perfectly integrate those aspects related to personnel’s technical and general competence, but fail to integrate competence and performance measurement instruments when it comes to determine the precise value for each of the factors involved in the estimation process. After reviewing the already deployed initiatives and recommendations for competence measurement in the industrial environment and the most relevant estimation methods for personnel factors used in software development projects, this article presents a recommendation for the integration of each of the ‘human factor’ related metrics in COCOMO II with the management tools proposed by People-CMM, which are widely implemented by existing commercial tools.