Assessing Software Processes over a New Generic Software Process Assessment Tool

Performing process improvement to deliver qualified products with the expected cost on time has been a requirement for organizations targeting to be successful in the software market. Software organizations usually perform process improvement based on well-known process assessment frameworks such as CMMI and ISO/IEC 15504. A number of derivatives of CMMI and ISO/IEC 15504 have been developed and they are being updated. As a result of this, the software process assessment tool based on them needs to be updated. Process assessment requires judgment and there is an unavoidable manual work. However, there are also opportunities for assessment automation. Therefore, there is a need for a generic software process assessment tool to define process assessment models and facilitate assessment. The existing tools do not meet the expected features of a software process assessment tool completely, as they have generally been developed for single process assessment models. In this study, we present GSPA, a generic software process assessment tool, which has been developed to support all structured process assessment models with its generic framework, facilitate assessment, support parallel assessment and present the reports in a well-structured way to the assessors. A multiple case study has been conducted to measure the sufficiency and the contributions of the tool.