Assessing the software process maturity of software engineering courses

Since its introduction by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) in 1987, the SEI Software Process Maturity Model has gained wide visibility and acceptance by industry. Its overall goal is to enable an organization to assess its software process maturity in order that it might be able to improve its software development process. Inspired by the success of the SEI model, this paper describes an attempt to develop an analogous, but highly simplified and unvalidated process maturity framework applicable to software engineering project courses. Our goal is to enable an instructor of a software engineering project course to assess the software development processes utilized in the course and to improve these processes leading to better managed and more successful projects.