Process-Based Project Management and SPI

Software process definition and improvement are frequent strategies followed by software companies in order to enhance software quality and boost development productivity. Software processes are used for guiding development teams while executing projects, and also as a basis for project planning and monitoring. There are some tools available for software process definition and a plethora of tools for project management with support for project planning and monitoring. These tools are usually not integrated so project plans are made manually possibly introducing inconsistencies with respect to the process they are based on. Moreover, when project management is not performed using an integrated tool, plan and trace also differ. Measuring process execution is a common path for SPI. To this end, matching tasks in the process, plan and trace is needed to understand where the process fails and how it might be improved. Inconsistencies among these artifacts hinders SPI since manually matching tasks demands a large effort. In this paper we define an approach for process-based project management that reduces these inconsistencies. We present CASPLE, a tool that supports this approach, and we illustrate its application in PowerData, a small Chilean company. A case study of applying the approach and CASPLE in four of our industrial partners is also presented.