Supporting the Process Assessment through a Flexible Software Environment

A process assessment method provides elements in order to produce information which gives an overall view of the process capability. This information helps to determine the current state of software processes, their strengths and weaknesses. Owing to the fact that the assessment can be performed according to a given assessment process or any other and the processes of the organization can also use one particular process model or any other, we have developed an environment composed of two components; one of these generates the database schema for storing the process reference model and assessment information and the other one assesses the process with reference to this information, generating results in several formats, to make it possible to interpret data. The goal of this work is to show an environment that allows us to carry out assessments that are in accord with various different process assessment models, on several process reference models. This assessment environment has been developed and used in the context of the COMPETISOFT project in order to support its process assessment activities.