Using Formal Specifications in the Implementation of CMMI

There are two main aspects of quality assurance in computational systems development and maintenance projects: the process and product view. Several standard models have been proposed for a systematic process improvement, e.g., CMM/CMMI, Agile, SPICE, or the ISO 9000 family. However, even the best process can not guarantee that the resulting products are as expected. For a rigorous analysis of the products, formal specification based development methods have been proposed. Examples are VDM, Z, LOTOS, CSP and CASL. In this paper we connect these two aspects by showing how to integrate formal specification based methods in process improvement models. In particular, we investigate the use of the specification language CSP-CASL for the implementation of CMMI within an organization. CMMI is based on the notion of process area, which is a cluster of best practices with particular goals in a certain area. For each of the relevant process areas, we show in detail how using formal specifications can help to achieve specific goals. This is a first step to systematically combine product based quality assurance methods with process improvement models.