Systematic software process development: where do we stand today?

A software process metamodel (SPMM) defines a language to describe concrete software processes in a structured manner. Although agile methods gained much attention in recent years, we still need to provide process engineers with adequate tools to design, implement, publish and deploy, and manage comprehensive software processes. In response to this need, several SPMMs have been developed. It remains, however, unclear, which of those SPMMs are disseminated to which extent. In this paper, we contribute first results of a study on the state-of-the-art in the systematic development of software processes using standardized SPMMs and their corresponding infrastructure. Our results show that only a few documented standards exist and, furthermore, that among those standards only two are disseminated into practice. We focus on those standardized SPMMs, show their process ecosystem, and sketch a first picture on the state-of-the-art in SPMM-based software process develop- ment in order to foster discussions on further problem-driven research.