A Tool for Modeling Software Development Contexts in Small Software Organizations

Characterizing the software development context has been recognized as relevant for a variety of purposes, particularly for tailoring the organizational software processes according to the features of each project to be addressed. That tailoring activity makes the software processes more efficient and effective. However, formally modeling software development contexts, which is usually required to perform this tailoring activity, represents a challenge for many organizations, and particularly for small software companies, which usually have low expertise and resources to deal with formal methods and notations. This paper presents a usable software tool for defining the software development context for an organization and also for particular projects. Preliminary evaluations of the tool usability and usefulness have been performed. The obtained results indicate that the tool provides all the services required to model development context, and potential users found it easy to use.