Towards an integrated approach for software process improvement

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Software Process Improvement (SPI) has become more and more important during the past few years, since competition is increasingly determined by the software portion of products and services. The use of best practices in software development promises to provide a competitive advantage and to result in higher customer satisfaction. Over the years, many different SPI approaches have been developed. This thesis presents an integrated SPI approach that enhances process assessments in such a way that the information about products and their relationship to the processes under evaluation in the assessment is explicitly elicited and documented according to a conceptual model. This allows the automatic generation of a consistent process model skeleton that can be used as the basis for subsequent process modeling activities, which have consequently also been adopted accordingly. The validation performed with the help of an experiment and a case study in industry shows that the integration of process assessment and process modeling increases the quality of the assessment as well as the resulting process model and leads to effort reduction in the course of software process improvement.