Managing the software process with a software process improvement tool in a small enterprise

SUMMARY Top‐down process improvement approaches provide a high‐level model of what the process of a software development organization should be. Such models are based on the consensus of a designated working group on how software should be developed or maintained. They are very useful in that they provide general guidelines on where to start improving, and in which order. However, the majority of them have only worked in scenarios within large companies. We aim to help small software development organizations to adopt an iterative approach by providing a Process Improvement Web‐based Tool (SysProVal). This paper presents research into the proposal that a small organization may use this tool to define and implement a set of project management practices that can be strengthened using the CMMI‐DEV 1.2 model as reference. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The main objective of this paper is to show that a Small Enterprise may use a Web‐based Tool, called SysProVal, using the CMMI‐DEV model as a framework in order to strengthen project management practices, improve the project performance, and achieve higher CMMI‐DEV capability levels. The tool is composed of three main interfaces according to the main users (only top management—top management interface, only project managers—project manager interface, and top management and project managers—SysProVal interface). Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.