LESSONS LEARNED FROM A SOFTWARE PROCESS MODELING SYSTEM

Competitive pressures on the software industry from home and abroad have encouraged organizations to examine the effectiveness of their software development and evolution processes. This examination is occurring within the context of establishing performance baselines, setting improvement goals, explicitly defining the normally implicit processes and measuring progress toward improvement goals. A typical objective of a company engaged in a software improvement initiative focused on achieving higher capability maturity levels is to document the current software process (i.e., "as is" baseline) and define one or more ideal processes (i.e., "to be" goal) to strive for.