Recommending process improvement package using direct and indirect relationships of activities

Software process improvement (SPI) has been widely practiced in various domains. SPI uses a process reference model (e.g., CMMI) for planning improvement actions by identifying weaknesses and strengths of the current exercise. Identified findings are analyzed for their relationships to increase the synergy of improvement actions. However, the current practice is monotonic focusing on the identification of weaknesses and strengths. In this work, we present a CMMI-based recommendation method for analyzing correlations of assessment findings. In the model, we define a process correlation model capturing relationships of practices in CMMI. The model is then used for inferring relationships of given findings where findings are viewed as instances of CMMI practices. We take into account both direct and indirect relationships and analyze the precision and recall of the correlation model by different levels of relationship depth. We evaluate the method using industrial data and the results show the potential of the method.