Using FCA Implication to Determine the Compliance of Model Practice Implementation for Software Process

Abstract

In a software process appraisal, an appraiser uses software artifacts as evidence to determine the compliance of model practice implementation in software development process. In so doing, the appraiser should have both knowledge of the process being assessed and that of model practices. The software process appraisal, therefore, is a knowledge intensive task, which requires appraisers' experience, expertise, judgment, and tacit knowledge of software engineering. In this work, we proposed to use formal concept analysis (FCA) to organize concepts representing knowledge involved in software process appraisal and to reasoning on the concepts in order to determine the compliance of model practice. The capability of the FCA lays the first stone for automated support for software process appraisal.