Measurement based continuous assessment of software engineering processes: Dissertation

Software process assessments are routinely used by the software industry to evaluate software processes before instigating improvement actions. They are also used to assess the capability of an organisation to produce software. Since assessments are perceived as expensive, time-consuming and disruptive for the workplace there is a need to find alternative practices for software process assessment. Especially interesting for this research was to understand and improve the way an organisation can monitor the software process status between regular assessments and how this monitoring can be achieved feasibly in an industrial setting. This thesis proposes a complementary paradigm for software process assessment - measurement based continuous assessment. This approach combines goal-oriented measurement and an emerging standard for software process assessment as the background framework for continuous assessment of the software engineering process. Software tools have been created to support the approach that has been tested in an industrial setting. The results show that the proposed approach is feasible and useful, and provides new possibilities and insights for software process assessment.