Concept, design & implementation of tool-support for adaptive process assessment

The area of process assessments is an emerging field of software engineering, and has a high practical relevance as stepping stone in software process improvement activities. Nevertheless, an assessment is often not affordable for small and medium sized companies. They need lightweight approaches, which provide nonetheless reliable results. Lightweight means in this context that the assessment can be performed in one to two days. The Fraunhofer IESE developed the FAME method, based on ISO/IEC 15504, to offer a framework for lightweight assessments. The goal of the thesis is to enhance the existing FAME framework to support multiple additional quality standards (e.g., ISO/IEC 12207, ISO/IEC 15288, and IEEE Standards). Based on the resulting concepts, a tool is developed to support an automated process for the lightweight assessment. It provides help during the preparation on the assessment and supports the interviews and associated data collection. The result is generated automatically as either a level chart or a process profile based on the data collected during the assessment. To support multiple standards, series of standards are introduced. The possibility of their integration to ISO/IEC 15504 assessment framework is evaluated. As a theoretical foundation of the tool development, we establish an informal approach to check and ensure the ISO/IEC 15504 compliance of the to be used standard. If required, the approach transforms the standard into an ISO/IEC 15504 compliant form. Over the theoretical foundation we developed a conceptual schema to model the assessment framework. The conceptual model enables the integration of additional standards and ensures the ISO/IEC 15504 compliance. The Tool development including database connectivity was based on the conceptual model.