Organizational and project process definition: A lightweight framework, supporting tool, and industry experience

Abstract

Process definition is the pillar step towards process improvement. An mature (e.g., CMMI level 3 or above) software development organization should define organizational standard processes, and make their projects establish projects' defined processes through tailoring the organizational standard processes. Existing research has proposed various models and formalism for process definition and tailoring. In order to be effective and efficient in the industry fields, one approach needs to make a good balance between formality and usability. In this paper, we present a lightweight framework for establishing organizational and project processes. The framework has a concise set of notions and simple meta-models for the process definition and tailoring, and is compatible with most of the popular models and standards. We also implement a tool supporting process definition, and enactment of the project's defined process by automatically generating project plan template. We have applied the framework and tool in our company for years. The application experience shows that the framework fits the small and medium-sized organization and projects well.