Software process commonality analysis

One of the major challenges in software development projects consists of defining appropriate development processes and tailoring them to project and organizational constraints. One solution for this problem is to develop domain-specific adaptable reference process models based on empirically gained experience, observation of real processes, and comparison of these processes. This article presents a technique for analyzing commonalities and differences between process instances and shows how to use this knowledge for creating software process reference models. The technique is based on different comparison strategies, which can be performed manually or tool-based (with the specifically developed tool SPEARSIM). The commonality analysis technique was evaluated in a case study in the wireless Internet service-engineering domain. Evaluation results are used to illustrate the technique