A quality assessment method for application management

In this paper we describe some of the work performed in the Esprit AMES (Application Management Environment Support) project. We describe our assessment matrix for evaluating a company's effectiveness at performing application management and our process model around which the assessment procedure is defined. This assessment matrix is loosely based on the work on the SEI's Capability Maturity Model (CMM) but has been specialised to make it applicable to software maintenance. In addition some of the major criticisms of the CMM questionnaire have been rectified. This has in turn led us to develop an assessment procedure which is capable of evaluating both qualitative and quantitative responses. This assessment procedure is fully described in the paper. A method for process improvement is also presented that allows an organisation to focus resources into areas that have been identified during the assessment process as requiring improvement. Finally we will describes some of the results that have been obtained by companies from the AMES consortium from using the assessment method.