A Formal Model for Evaluation of the Software Development Process based on Quality Indexes

The focus of the paper is evaluation of the software development process regardless of the underlying software development approach. The process of evaluation is scrutinized from two perspectives: (1) “measurement for management”, when results of evaluation are used for managing and improvement of the software development, and (2) “measurement for analysis”, when results of evaluation are used only for determination of the current state of the process. A formal model for evaluation based on quality indexes in two variations for each of these cases is proposed. According to the proposed model the software development process is viewed as a chain of sub-processes, each of which is characterized by an integral quality index or a set of integral indexes, depending on the case (1) or (2), and the aggregated quality index of the whole process is calculated from these. Some principles of accuracy assurance for the proposed model are discussed.