Helping small companies assess software processes

A first step toward process improvement is identifying the strengths and weaknesses of an organization´s software processes to determine effective improvement actions. An assessment can help an organization examine its processes against a reference model to determine the processes´ capability or the organization´s maturity, to meet quality, cost, and schedule goals, but small companies have difficulty running them. MARES, a set of guidelines for conducting 15504-conformant software process assessment focuses on small companies