Multi-Level Compliance Measurements for Software Process Appraisal

Software process appraisal is to assess whether an implemented software process complies with a process reference model. To conduct the appraisal, the appraisal team will request an organization to provide objective evidence reflecting practice implementation. Then such evidence will be examined, verified, and validated to generate appraisal results. This evidence collection process is done after a process is implemented. To better prepare for software process appraisal, we argued that the compliance of a process can be measured prior to its implementation. In light of that, we proposed multilevel compliance measurements to determine process reference model compliance, in terms of Process Model Readiness Score, Process Enactment Score, and Process Implementation Readiness Score. These measurements help provide an insight analysis of where the problems of practice implementation lie, i.e. at process modeling, at process enactment, or at process implementation. Keywords—Software Process Appraisal, Software Process Improvement (SPI), Insight Analysis, Compliance Measurement, Process Reference Model (PRM), Process Enactment