REP-chaRacterising and Exploiting Process components: results of experimentation

Software processes require continuous innovations to improve their quality and increase their maturity. Integrating process components, proposed in previous published works, to improve a process requires the formalisation of their informal description. This requirement stems from the need to understand and evaluate how adequate the process components are to the requirements of the innovation and how well they can be integrated into the software process. The approach REP, chaRacterising and Exploiting Process components, has been previously proposed by the authors. It includes a characterisation framework which serves to support the comprehension and evaluation of the process components being analysed. The aim of this paper is to verify whether the approach is effective if suitably used, by means of a controlled experiment testing the ability of the characterisation framework to formalise and evaluate a process component. The results obtained show that the framework is effective provided that the experimental subjects have been given sufficient training in its use.