Best Practices and Guidelines for Process Tailoring in Software Development

Posted by Ravindra under Software Development Processes

Best Practices and Guidelines for Process Tailoring in Offshore Software Development

What is Tailoring in Software Development?
Tailoring in Software development is the process of extracting a set of processes, tasks and artifacts from the organizations established processes, tasks and artifacts so as to best suit a project to achieve its objectives.

Practices and Guidelines

It is very important that we have a set of tailoring guidelines that will guide the development teams to let them decide what is best for the projects. The guidelines must also specify is that what is Tailorable and what is mandatory. For example in a software development project if a project manager says that the project need not maintain a project management plan then it should be not acceptable as per the tailoring guidelines. So basically there will be some processes, tasks and artifacts that will have to be developed and maintained in a software development project.

So these guidelines must take into account multiple aspects before being released as part of the organization quality management system. These aspects must look into the current state of process implementation, customer’s needs and objectives, project characteristics etc.

Organizations that are offerings services for different types of projects like Full life cycle development, maintenance, QA, Technical support must also look into coming up with life cycle models for each of these type of software projects. These life cycle models must go hand in hand with the Process tailoring guidelines established at the organization level.

The following steps can be considered as some important points that can help in coming up with the tailoring tasks at the project level.

STEPS AT PROJECT LEVEL
Identify Project Characteristics
Identify the characteristics of your software project. These characteristics will be useful in formulating a project strategy and in tailoring processes.

Formulate a Project Strategy
Based on the characteristics of your project, formulate a strategy by referring to Process tailoring guidelines that are established at the organization level.

Select a suitable Quality Management System (QMS) process
In QMS, processes must be defined for the different types of projects; example
· Development (Agile, Maintenance, Waterfall etc.)
· Maintenance projects
· QA Projects
· Technical Support Projects

The tailoring guidelines for project management and configuration management must be made applicable to all projects.

Select lifecycle model for the Software development project and tailor process element accordingly. For each process element, you can decide to do one of the following:

· Implement the process element as per guidelines
· Waive the process element
· Replace the process element
· Add a new process element

Waivers and replacements from the tailoring guidelines and new process elements not defined in the tailoring guidelines should be highlighted in Project Management Plan as Deviations and appropriate process must be followed in getting approvals for the waivers and deviations.

In my next article I will highlight the use of collaboration tools like Project Server and SharePoint and demonstrate how we can use simple features to come up with an effective way of performing process tailoring for software development projects. This will also address the fulfilling of GP 3.1 in CMMi Ver. 1.2 – Establishing projects defined process. We will understand more about Projects Defined process.