The Software Engineering Body of Knowledge: A Benchmarking Tool for Organizational Process Assessment and Improvement – Case Study

The Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (the SWEBOK Guide) represents the consensus on the knowledge that software engineers, and their organizations, should use whenever and wherever appropriate in software development. This paper presents an innovative use of this SWEBOK Guide as a benchmarking reference for software organizations interested in process improvement and looking for best practices. Process improvement approaches help organizations improve their processes and their performance. Before implementing improvements to existing processes, it is necessary to benchmark organization’s practices already in place against a reference, identifying process weaknesses and looking for best practices that can contribute to process improvement according to corporate priorities. This paper presents two industry case studies illustrating the use of the SWEBOK Guide for benchmarking purposes and process improvements. This paper presents also quantitative results of productivity and quality analyses in both organizations and discusses the candidate linkages.