The TAME Project: Towards Improvement-Oriented Software Environments

Experience from a dozen years of analyzing software engineering processes and products is summarized as a set of software engineering and measurement principles that argue for software engineering process models that integrate sound planning and analysis into the construction process. In the TAME (Tailoring A Measurement Environment) project at the University of Maryland we have developed such an improvement-oriented software engineering process model that uses the goal/question/metric paradigm to integrate the constructive and analytic aspects of software development. The model provides a mechanism for formalizing the characterization and planning tasks, controlling and improving projects based on quantiative analysis, learning in a deeper and more systematic way about the software process and product, and feeding the appropriate experience back into the current and future projects. The TAME system is an instantiation of the TAME software engineering process model as an ISEE (Integrat ed Software Engineering Environment). The first in a series of TAME system prototypes has been developed. An assessment of experience with this first limited prototype is presented including a reassessment of its initial architecture. The long-term goal of this building effort is to develop a better understanding of appropriate ISEE architectures that optimally support the improvement-oriented TAME software engineering process model.