Total software process model evolution in EPOS - Experience report

This paper presents a case study of Norwegian banking software house where the objective is to adopt a categorization framework for managing evolution in software projects to identify project profiles and evolution patterns, and to suggest improvements to better support frequent evolutions. Based on an analysis of collected evolution data from an ongoing case study, we elaborate a QIP-inspired method and own techniques to evolve corresponding process models in our Process-centered Software Engineering Environment, called EPOS. The method describes also how to synthesize and reuse evolution experience from completed projects to improve planning and estimation in new similar projects. The collected data demonstrates that requirement changes which are detected in later development phases, are major causes for cost overruns in the studied organization.