Towards Automated Process Assessment in Software Engineering

When assessing software engineering processes, current reference models approaches typically rely on manual techniques for acquiring evidence of practices, which is then correlated with expected model attributes to assess compliance. This is costly, error-prone, and assessment feedback is infrequent and detached from the original context. Automated data acquisition could improve this situation, but must overcome various challenges. This paper presents an automated approach for process assessment that relies on semantic extensions to a process-aware information system to provide an in-the-loop automated process assessment capability. This can reduce the effort required to determine process compliance, maturity, or improvement, and can provide more timely and precise feedback compared to current manual process assessment methods and tools. The evaluation showed the approach’s technical feasibility, model diversifiability across various process assessment models (CMMI, ISO/IEC 15504, ISO 9001), and suitable performance and scalability. All in all, this paper contributes a practical, variable approach for automating parts of the assessment of executed processes. Keywords-software engineering process assessment; semantic technology; Capability Maturity Model Integration; ISO/IEC 15504; ISO 9000