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Design and implementation of lightweight software process assessment methods: Survey of best practices

Abstract:

Software process assessment (SPA) is an effective tool to understand an organization's process quality and to explore improvement opportunities. The knowledge represented as good-practices to develop assessment methods is, unfortunately, scattered in the literature concerned with developing either lightweight or heavyweight SPA methods. This paper organizes the set of recognized best practices that assessment methods' designers can use to design and implement their assessment methods. Such practices are presented in the literature as assessment requirements, success factors, observations, and lessons learned. A set of 38 practices has been collected and classified into five main classes, namely practices related to SPA methods, support tools, procedure, documentation, and users. The collected set of practices will help improving knowledge and skills in designing and conducting assessments. Although the collected set of best practices is important to design both lightweight and heavyweight methods, they are of utmost importance to design lightweight assessment methods, because these methods are developed based on individual experience and less rigor design approaches than heavyweight methods.