Towards a Framework for Improving Software Development Process Mediated with CMMI Goals and Agile Practices

Problems in software development mainly spring from the difficulty of establishing and stabilizing the requirements, the changeability of the software and interactive dependency of the software, hardware and human beings. A software development process consists of a set of empirical and ‘best’ practices in software development, together with organization and management that are needed for the software product implementation. Different process models, such as CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration), ISO 9001 and ISO 15504, have been developed in the last decade to support the assessment of software development processes. The main process model, examined in this thesis, is CMMI. This model was chosen as the focus of this research because it is a widely-used, beneficial approach for identifying the key weaknesses of a software development process which need immediate attention and improvement. Two of the key challenges of CMMI assessments are 1) overly heavy and time-consuming assessments and 2) the risk that the achievement of CMMI levels forces the developers to use more time writing documents than implementing the software product. The level of interest in the use of agile practices (focusing on practices such as eXtreme Programming and Scrum) has radically increased in software organizations. Practitioners argue that the adoption of agile software development methods can solve the organizational need for a more rapid and flexible software development process, and enable improved communication in changing market situations. A brief analysis of the empirical body of knowledge reveals, however, that there are also several challenges in interactive dependency management and communication between the actors of software development in an agile context.

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