An Evaluation of the Need for Software Process Improvement by Analytic Hierarchy Process

Software engineering organizations now tend to improve their processes according to such standards as CMM (Capability Maturity Model), a process evaluation model, in addition to improving their software products. This is because it is believed that mature engineering processes can bring high-quality products within the original schedule. It is reported, however, that the result of the improvement activities is strongly related with engineer satisfaction for the process, that is, effective improvement can be expected on the phases where engineers have not been satisfied with. This paper proposes a method to evaluate how much engineers feel the current engineering process needs to be improved, with Descriptive AHP (Descriptive Analytic Hierarchy Process), one of decision making tools. Our method, based on the idea that the necessity evaluation can be related with engineers satisfaction, evaluates four engineering phases under six criteria defined at CMM Level 2, determining which phases should be improved first. As a result of having system engineers use this method, we found that quality assurance activities in the manufacturing and examination phases need to be superior for improvement to other phases.