Software process improvement in small software development firms

Most of small software development firms use ad-hoc manner in developing their software products where it is difficult for them to achieve the requirements of the traditional software process improvement (SPI) models and standards, as these traditional models and standards were developed for large firms. As such, these firms are suffering from the lack of suitable software development methods that will enable them to follow the SPI models. This can be addressed by having a suitable software development process improvement framework to enable them in delivering high quality software products that fulfil the customer's expectation faster and cheaper. This paper presents the software development process improvement framework which was developed based on the Capability Maturity Model Integration Version 1.2 for Development (CMMI-DEV1.2) as a software improvement model and eXtreme Programming (XP) as a software development method.It discusses the development processes of this framework by highlighting the steps and stages involved