ALM Tool Data Usage in Software Process Metamodeling

Project Management and Software Process Improvement (SPI) are essential parts of software engineering. A multitude of project management techniques and tools, such as Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) ones, are available, and there is an abundance of software methodologies, process metamodels and best practice descriptions. Despite the role of tools in enacting the processes, the underlying domain models used in these two fields -- ALM tools and software process metamodels -- often significantly differ. This hinders the project execution analysis using the data available from the tools, such as the verification of the project's alignment with a given methodology or the detection of bad practices (anti-patterns). In this paper we describe our work towards enabling such analyses. First we survey the domain models of major process metamodels and tools, and discuss the commonalities and open issues. We then propose a software process metamodel inspired by some of the established metamodels and reflecting the structures of data which can be mined from project management tools. The proposed metamodel is being validated by a prototype process data repository with import interfaces for major ALM tools.