Improving application management process through qualitative framework

Industrial companies using software as a key technology have noticed the importance of software process development. We use the term "application management" to denote the software process activities related to software maintenance and evolution. We outline experience in the development of an application management process and in using a process modeling tool in an organization developing embedded systems applications. This paper shows the phases of improvement procedures and compares process modeling with a more comprehensive improvement framework called PR/sup 2/IMER. We use an embedded system of the aerospace domain as a case study. We model the software maintenance and evolution process of a small company which is acting as a subcontractor in large aerospace projects. A software process modeling tool called ProcessWEAVER is used to model the maintenance and evolution process.