Formalising Process Assessment and Capability Determination: An Ontology Approach

Determining the extent to which software development process achieves its purpose is a major concern in software engineering. Where as software process prescribes the actions, software developers should undertake to produce quality software products within budget and time frame, process assessment on the other hand, is designed to evaluate the performance and capability of the undertaken software process to achieve business objectives. Process assessment models such as ISO/IEC 15504-5 rely on conventional methods of evidence collection to rate process attributes and determine the capability level of the assessed process. Conventional methods are however, subjective, time consuming and prone to errors. In earlier work, we developed a formalisation approach for the process dimension of process assessment model (PAM). In the current paper, we extend our formalisation approach to the process capability dimension of PAM using a semantically computable formalism to enable automated process attribute rating and capability determination. We demonstrate and evaluate the functionality of our approach using capability level two for software requirements analysis (SRA) process.