Deriving Software Acquisition Process from Maturity Models—An Experience Report

Abstract

The establishment of an existing practice scenario was an essential component in providing a basis for further research in the area of COTS software acquisition within the organisation. This report details the identification of means of describing the existing practice of software acquisition within an organisation and identification of models that could be used to present this view. The chosen best practices descriptions for the idealized model were maturity models, including SA-CMM, CMMI-ACQ, and ISO/IEC 12207. This report describes these models briefly and then describes the process of identifying the requirements for idealizing these maturity models into process frameworks that could be identified to actually business process models from a real organisation in order to identify gaps and optimizations within the organisation’s realization of the best practices model. It also identified the next steps in identification of the theoretical best practice framework, which will involve translation of the model to YAWL Petri nets and simulation of the process in order to identify potential modelling flaws or issues with framework efficiency. Implications of the currently ongoing research include the identification and correspondence of specific tasks and activities from ITIL and CoBiT frameworks with the generic key process areas of software acquisition frameworks and identification of sufficiently detailed structural framework models for each level in order to identify appropriate frameworks for application even in cases where these frameworks were not explicitly identified by the organisation or the researcher.