Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Software Process Evaluation: A Proposed Approach

This paper presents a method that combines a qualitative assessment method based on CMMI to uncover improvement areas of an organization’s software process, and a quantitative approach to measure the software process productivity rate. The evaluation scope is first established: a list of projects and a list of CMMI key process areas to assess. The measurement of the productivity rate is obtained by measuring the functional size of the software developed and/or enhanced through projects, and then compared with the recorded project effort. The main reason for combining the approaches is to gain a deeper understanding of the organization’s software process by examining the software requirements artefacts, which reveals the weaknesses of the requirements engineering portion of the software process. As a proof of the concept, a field trial of the combined method has been applied successfully in an organization developing financial trading systems.