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Procedia Technology 9 (2013) 664 669

CENTERIS 2013 - Conference on ENTERprise Information Systems / PRojMAN 2013 International Conference on Project MANagement / HCIST 2013 - International Conference on
Health and Social Care Information Systems and Technologies

QRP: a CMMI Appraisal Tool for Project Quality Management

Alberto Allua, Eladio Domnguezb, Antonio Lpeza, Mara A. Zapatab*
a

Infozara Consultora Informtica, Marina Espaola 12, pral. C, Zaragoza 50006, Spain
b
Universidad de Zaragoza, Pedro Cerbuna 12, Zaragoza 50009, Spain

Abstract
Organizations adopt software process improvement (SPI) frameworks for developing higher-quality software more
efficiently. CMMI is one of the most widely used SPI frameworks; however, software tools that provide a higher
automation level are required. In this paper, the QRP platform, which guides and evaluates conformance to a CMMI level,
is presented. The main innovation provided by the platform is the automation of the CMMI level assessment using
evidences collected during day-to-day project development, facilitating the appraisal of CMMI to a great extent.
2013 The
Authors
Publishedby
byElsevier
Elsevier Ltd.
Ltd. Open
access and/or
under CCpeer-review
BY-NC-ND license.
2013
Published
Selection
under responsibility of
Selection CENTERIS/ProjMAN/HCIST.
and/or peer-review under responsibility of SCIKA Association for Promotion and Dissemination of
Scientific Knowledge
Keywords: Software Process Improvement; Quality Assurance; Project Control and Monitoring; CMMI; SCAMPI

1. Introduction
Organizations adopt software process improvement (SPI) frameworks to achieve more effectiveness in their
development process and a higher quality of the final software product [1, 2]. Specifically, CMMI (Capability
Maturity Model Integration) is an SPI framework [1] that, on the one hand, provides guidance for improving the

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +34-976-761131; fax: +34-976-761132.

E-mail address: mazapata@unizar.es.

2212-0173 2013 The Authors Published by Elsevier Ltd. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license.
Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of SCIKA Association for Promotion and Dissemination of Scientific Knowledge
doi:10.1016/j.protcy.2013.12.073

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software lifecycle and, on the other hand, can be used for appraising the maturity of the development process
[3].
However, the adoption of CMMI by organizations is not a simple task. There are studies that describe
successful CMMI adoption cases [4, 5], but other analyses conclude that sometimes organizations consider it to
be infeasible to adopt CMMI, requiring radically less cost and time [2, 6]. For this reason, a solution could be
any tool or software platform that facilitates and eases the adoption of CMMI, reducing cost or time [7].
In this paper, we describe QRP (Quality Ready Portal), which is a platform that supports quality assurance
during the different phases of project development. The main innovation provided by this platform is the
automation of the assessment of the degree of compliance with a CMMI maturity or capacity level through the
natural use of the platform, facilitating the appraisal of the CMMI to a great extent.
The paper is structured as follows. The next section is devoted to presenting our proposal and the related
work. Section 3 explains the way in which process monitoring is performed by means of QRP. The CMMI
appraisal by means of QRP is presented in Section 4. The last section includes conclusions and future work.
2. Proposal and related work
Software process improvement (SPI) has been the subject of intensive research. Most papers address SPI
from a prescriptive (telling the SPI professionals what to do), descriptive (reporting actual instances of SPI
programs), or reflective (theoretically analysing) goal [1]. However, few articles are devoted to analysing or
proposing software support systems for facilitating and easing the adoption of SPI practices.
Among the several proposed SPI frameworks, CMMI for Development (CMMI-DEV) is a collection of best
practices for improving engineering processes and development in organizations that develop products and
services [3]. With the goal of identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the processes of an organization and
assessing the organizations proximity to CMMI best practices, regular assessments of compliance with the
model are conducted. Specifically, the Standard CMMI Appraisal Method for Process Improvement (SCAMPI)
is the official CMMI appraisal method that is used to evaluate organizations processes and to provide ratings
[8].
A problem is that the adoption of CMMI by organizations is occasionally infeasible [2, 6], and it is
necessary to facilitate this task to avoid wasting time and cost. One way of achieving this goal is to provide
organizations with tools or software products that make the adoption of CMMI easier. However, few tools
support all of the types of CMMI-related activities because the support level that is provided is often very
limited and a tools ability to be customised according to the users needs is quite small [9]. To our knowledge,
MATURE [9] is the most flexible and adaptable tool because it supports the automatic generation of a language
that can be used to specify process area practices. The main problem is that this adaptability makes it difficult
to be used by a non-expert user in SPI. Other more specific tools, such as Spago4Q [10] or Polarion
(www.polarion.com), up we know, do not implement the official CMMI appraisal method SCAMPI.
Our proposal, QRP (Quality Ready Portal) is a platform that supports quality assurance during the different
phases of project implementation. This platform adopts CMMI-DEV as an SPI model and implements the
SCAMPI method. The main innovation provided by the platform is the automation of the assessment of the
degree of compliance with a CMMI level through the natural use of the platform. Therefore, QRP is a platform
that is integrated into daily work and that guides and evaluates the conformance to a CMMI level.
QRP has been designed with a modular architecture based on three levels of generality: the system,
organizational and project levels. Figure 1 shows a partial diagram of this architecture, which represents the
modules that we will discuss in this study (modules of the system level are not included). The platform has
been designed and implemented to be offered as an SaaS (Software as a Service) at the third level of maturity,
which means that it can provide service to multiple clients with a single instance of the software [11].

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Fig. 1. Partial QRP architecture.

Fig. 2. CMMI Guide user interface.

3. The platform as support for CMMI-based process monitoring

The platform provides, as the main product level innovation, the possibility of generating, rapidly and semiautomatically, the database of objective evidences that is required by compliance audits [8]. This approach is
possible because the evidences to be provided are recorded in the platform during day-to-day use, with their
validation being the only effort required by a person. It must be noted that the manual construction of this
database would require a large effort from the audited organization. The use of the term semiautomatic is given
by the validation task and, additionally, by the possibility that the platform gives to a person to contribute with
his own assessments (which will take priority over the assessments automatically given by the system). We will
now show how the platform serves to support the implementation of a CMMI level and its subsequent
compliance assessment. The descriptions of the processes have been grouped according to the level of
generality that they belong to.

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3.1. Organizational level processes

First, the CMMI guide module supports the decision making in relation to both the level and type of
representation (staged or continuous) of the CMMI-DEV that is going to be implemented. With very few
mouse clicks, a user can obtain information that would be time-consuming to obtain if it were to be recovered
from the official documentation. The user interface of the module can be observed in Figure 2 (the tool is
deployed in Spanish, and all of the screenshots are in Spanish).
Once the decision is made, the process areas, goals and practices involved in the CMMI level to be achieved
are established by the CMMI Implementation module. The UML class diagram of Figure 3 represents the
relationships among the concepts implemented in QRP. At this moment, depending on whether the selected
representation is staged or continuous, the Staged Target Profile or the Continuous Target Profile (see Figure 3)
is defined. Comparing our proposed CMMI model with others, the model considered by other authors in some
cases is very simple [12]; in other cases, the model is more complete [9, 13], but we did not find any published
model that includes the staged and continuous target profile concepts as ours does. Thus, we can conclude that
QRP provides very wide CMMI support.
Next, using the Organizational Processes module, the process map of the organization can be defined while
associating each of the processes with the corresponding CMMI process areas. Figure 4 (a) shows an example
of process map defined in the platform.
With this information, QRP establishes the relationships between the organizational processes and the
CMMI process areas as well as among the types of artefacts that can be produced in each process and the
corresponding CMMI practices (see Figure 3). At the project level, the Document Manager module will
determine, for each documental artefact, the CMMI practice for which it will be evidence (without needing to
establish this relationship individually for each artefact) by means of the relationship between types of artefacts
and practices.
related with

CMMI model
Maturity
Level

1..*

*
*
Staged
Target Profile
0..1

*
Continuous
Target Level

*
Process
Area
*

*
*
Organization
Process Map 1

Practice

*
*

*
Specific
Goal
1

Specific
Practice

Generic
Practice

1..*

1..*

0..1

1
Capability
Level

Goal
1..*
Generic
Goal

* 1 Continuous
Target Profile

*
1

1
1..*

1
Project
Process Map

*
*

Process

*
*
1 * Artefact
* Artefact
Type 1

1 Artefact
State

1
1
Project

Nonversioned
Artefact
0..1

Process model

Fig. 3. CMMI and process conceptual representation in QRP.

Pending

Versioned
Artefact
0..1

version of

Rejected

Approved

Published

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(a)

(b)

Fig. 4. (a) Process map example; (b) CMMI Appraisal user interface.

3.2. Project-level processes

Once the platform has the process map of the organization, by means of the Project Manager module, the
projects that will be executed following that process map are recorded. For each project, a more specific
version of the process map, called the project process map, is defined (see Figure 3). The Project Processes
module allows the user to adapt this map to the needs of the project (process
(
tailoring); for example, in a low
complexity project, we could discard artefact types for some of the processes.
During the daily work in each of the projects, the Document M
Manager module will enable the recording of
the different documental artefacts that are generated; as indicated previously, the documental artefacts are
associated with a type of artefact, being, through this classification, related to the process in which they have
been generated (see Figure 3). Therefore, people who are responsible for publishing documental artefacts on
the platform do not need to know the details of the processes, it is sufficient to know the type of artefact.
To ensure the validity of the documental artefacts before being considered as evidence in the CMMI
appraisal, the platform enables their collaborative validation. In this way, a documental artefact is considered to
be valid only by the unanimous vote of all persons who perform such an evaluation.
The Business Intelligence module allows defining Performance indicators for Project-level process
measurements, for example, the average time to finish a documental artefact or the deviation of the planned
time schedule. This module also allows performing data analysis using OLAP cubes.
4. The platform as a support for the CMMI appraisal
All of the actions described so far are directed to enabling the assessment of the degree of compliance with
CMMI through documental artefacts that are recorded in the day-to-day project execution. The CMMI
Appraisal module implements the rules that are established by the SCAMPI method [8] to identify the strengths
and weaknesses of the processes of an organization and to assess its proximity to the best practices of CMMI.
Figure 4 (b) shows the user interface of this module.
Similar to an official audit, the CMMI Appraisal module requires the selection of a set of basic units, which
in our case are projects. Once they are selected, QRP automatically detects, as feasible objective evidence, all
of the documental artefacts that were recorded during the execution of the selected projects.
As a final step, before achieving an automatic assessment of the CMMI degree of compliance, the provided
evidences must be examined and validated. After this operation, the module automatically provides an

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assessment for each of the practices and the goal and process areas that correspond to the assessed level. This
assessment can be modified by the person who is responsible for conducting the assessment. In this case, the
last assessment prevails. After finishing the assessment process, either automatically or with human
intervention, the report with the results of the assessment and the list of objective evidences provided in each of
the practices can be generated as a Microsoft Excel file.
5. Conclusions
A CMMI appraisal tool for project quality management has been presented, for which the main innovation is
the integration of the platform into daily work and the provision of a quick and semi-automatic way for
evaluating its conformance to a CMMI level.
The implementation of other existing software process improvement frameworks, with the aim of increasing
the flexibility of the QRP, [1] is a goal for further development.
Acknowledgments
This work has been partially supported in its initial stages by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism and
Commerce (Project QRP (TSI-020302-2009-28)) and later by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation
(TIN2009-13584 and SMOTY (IPT-2011-1328-390000)), The Centre for Industrial Technological
Development (CDTI) (THOFU (CEN20101019)), the Government of Aragon and the European Social Fund.
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