Compliance of CMMI Process Area with Specification Based Development

The development of reliable systems is still a major challenge for software industry. Construction of such a system requires both process and product based quality assurance. Many process improvement models have been suggested in industry and found appropriate for achieving high quality products. Examples of such process improvement models are CMM/CMMI, Agile, SPICE, the ISO 9000 family etc. However, implementation of these process improvement models often adds significant extra efforts. To minimize process implementation costs we propose a formal specification based product development model which integrates product and process quality. Formal specification methods have been in practice since decades, and have been successful in the development of safety-critical systems. Some formal methods are VDM, Z, LOTOS, CSP and CASL. In particular, we investigate the compliance of CMMI process area with the formal specification language CSP-CASL. CMMI is based on the notion of process area, which is a cluster of best practices with particular goals in a certain area. For each of the relevant process areas, we show how formal specifications can contribute to achieve the specific goals of that process area. This integration is a new result for achieving process compliance parallel with product development. We demonstrate our approach with an industrial case study.