Implementation of a RIA Tool for Supporting a Collaborative Initiative of Software Process Improvement

Under a Software Process Improvement (SPI) environment, all phases of a process improvement initiative involving establishing commitment, assessment or diagnosing, improvement plans generation, pilot implementation and improvements deployment, may be accomplished collaboratively by different groups inside an enterprise. Organizational, technical and process-based circumstances have an impact on process assessment and modeling practices. Based on a Model-based Collaborative Design, a strategy for collaborative process assessment and modeling is proposed. This collaborative support helps project managers in overcoming complexities and to create a common understanding of the process and products of a SPI initiative. Finally, a Rich Internet Application (RIA) is developed and applied to provide strong support for distributed project managers, to collaboratively assess and model their software process within a SPI project, the CEForSPI (Collaborative Environment For Software Process Improvement) prototype. This tool represents a collaborative strategy to support SPI teams in handling the different phases of a typical SPI lifecycle.