The use of a meta-model to support multi-project process measurement

Abstract

In today's environment, software companies are engaged in multiple projects delivered on heterogeneous platforms for a wide class of applications in disparate application domains. They are increasingly engaged in the co-development of software systems through joint software development projects including staff from partners and customers as well as their own. As a result, they must support multiple software development processes while trying to guarantee uniform levels of process enactment, and product quality across all projects. Our approach is capable of providing process measurement in a joint-project, multi-process model business environment. It is based on a simple meta-model for computing across-process, multiple-project metrics designed to permit monitoring of CMMI compliance. The open source tool Spago4Q has been developed to support our approach and is capable of producing the measurements needed for monitoring of a set of large-scale development projects using different process models, in a real industrial setting in Europe. The results support the view that that it will not always be possible to aggregate the same set of metrics across disparate process models.