A framework for software process deployment and evaluation

Context: Software Process Engineering promotes the systematic production of software by following a set of welldefined technical and management processes. A comprehensive management of these processes involves the accomplishment of a number of activities such as model design, verification, validation, deployment and evaluation. However, the deployment and evaluation activities need more research efforts in order to achieve greater automation. Objective: With the aim of minimizing the required time to adapt the tools at the beginning of each new project and reducing the complexity of the construction of mechanisms for automated evaluation, the Software Process Deployment & Evaluation Framework (SPDEF) has been elaborated and is described in this paper. Method: The proposed framework is based on the application of well-known techniques in Software Engineering, such as Model Driven Engineering and Information Integration through Linked Open Data. It comprises a systematic method for the deployment and evaluation, a number of models and relationships between models, and some software tools. Results: Automated deployment of the OpenUP methodology is tested through the application of the SPDEF framework and support tools to enable the automated quality assessment of software development or maintenance projects. Conclusions: Making use of the method and the software components developed in the context of the proposed framework, the alignment between the definition of the processes and the supporting tools is improved, while the existing complexity is reduced when it comes to automating the quality evaluation of software processes.