An Automatic Compliance Checking Approach for Software Processes

A lot of knowledge has been accumulated and documented in the form of process models, standards, best practices, etc. The knowledge tells how a high quality software process should look like, in other words, which constrains should be fulfilled by a software process to assure high quality software products. Compliance checking for a predefined process against proper constrains is helpful to quality assurance. Checking the compliance of an actual performed process against some constrains is also helpful to process improvement. Manual compliance checking is time-consuming and error-prone, especially for large and complex processes. In this paper, we record the process knowledge by means of process pattern. We provide an automatic compliance checking approach for process models against constrains defined in process patterns. Checking results indicate where and which constrains are violated, and therefore suggests the focuses of future process improvement. We have applied this approach in three real projects and the experimental results are also presented.