Incremental, collaborative software process improvement in a tiny software group

Defined software processes using quality models like CMM have proven to be effective means to develop software in large organizations. The effort required to define or tailor a process for a very small group may easily exceed available resources. Our aim is to define a software process compatible with CMM level 3 for a 1-dozen engineer organization, without committing significant resources. We have defined a model for processes based upon small process elements and a collaborative method to incrementally describe processes from actual practice. The model is implemented using XML.