The Tutelkan Reference Process: A Reusable Process Model for Enabling SPI in Small Settings

The adoption of international standards and models of process quality is difficult for small organizations due to several issues they face, such as inability to afford the associated costs and unawareness of SPI benefits. This article presents the Tutelkan Reference Process (TRP), a public software process that is conformant to CMMI-DEV v1.2, ISO 9001:2000 and Competisoft, and whose process assets can be reused as baseline for developing specific software process in small organizations. We present the methods we applied to evaluate standard-compliance of TRP, which are based on mapping techniques and methods used to appraise and audit organizations, and discuss how TRP is applied as part of an SPI framework oriented to small settings. When using TRP organizations become aware of their level of compliance with international standards, since each reusable asset contains information about the specific CMMI-DEV v1.2 practices, ISO 9001:2000 clauses and Competisoft activities it conforms to.