Process Information

Attached worksheets:	SDM > Roles SDM > Practices SDM > Artifacts
Related Documents:	Standard Glossary

Process Impact: This document and its attached worksheets describe the software development process that is being used on this project. Having a defined software process helps us coordinate our myriad activities and allows us to make real improvements over time.

Process Overview

How is this document organized?

This page provides an overview of our development process. The attached worksheets contain the details of the roles, practices, and artifacts that together define our process.

Briefly, what is the overall process?

Our software development methodology is basically a waterfall, but it is tuned to the specific needs of web application development. While each release is a waterfall, we do many small releases.

We follow a highly iterative development process (3-month cycles) with an emphasis on prototyping to validate requirements. Our emphasis is on change control and on-going requirements management rather than up-front planning.

We have used more of a waterfall process in the past, but now we are incorporating a few key ideas from open source and agile processes. Specifically, we want more incremental integration and testing, while keeping more formal planning and requirements.

We bought into XP, in principle, but our projects are too large to do without focusing more on traditional practices. We emphasize planning, specification, and design with a 12-to-24-month horizon. We set high goals for test coverage and spend significant time on reviews.

What are the most important principles of our software development process?

• Essential
  • Professional ethics: e.g., ACM Professional Standards
  • Responsibility: we follow through on our promises.
  • Cooperation: we work with other stakeholders for the benefit of the overall organization.
  • PRINCIPLE
• Expected
  • Quality: we build software that we are proud of and willing to support.
  • Manageability: our process and status are transparent and we take direction well.
  • PRINCIPLE
• Desired
  • Productivity: we produce software with reasonable cost and schedule.
  • Innovation: we produce software that is ahead of the competition.
  • Staff development: we are dedicated to our staff's professional development.
  • PRINCIPLE