Model-supported process adoption and assessment in the context of multiple practice repositories

Although software products exist for more than 60 years, their successful development within a software project is still a challenge. A reason for this high failure rate might be poor software processes and the lack of systematic software process improvement. Considerable attention has been given to software process improvement in the last years and thus, practice repositories, such as CMMI-DEV, SPICE, COBIT, ITIL, have been defined. These are collections of best practices that describe activities which have proven themselves as guidelines for the improvement of software processes in organizations. Organizations use the practice repositories by adopting them or by performing assessments based on them. Moreover, many organizations aim to use multiple practice repositories to benefit from synergy effects and to achieve a higher effectiveness in the software process improvement. However, there are several challenges when using multiple practice repositories. These repositories have to be addressed in a coordinated and systematic way to benefit from them correspondingly. MOSAIC, a model based approach, is proposed to support the usage of multiple practice repositories and achieve an effective and efficient adoption and assessment based on an integration of these repositories with the software project context. This integration allows various analysis activities to be automatically performed on the integrated models. Consequently, best suited practices from multiple practice repositories can be automatically selected, similar practices and the dependencies between them can be automatically identified.