What the software industry says about the practices modelled in current software process models?

A series of surveys has been designed and conducted in order to seek the practical foundations of the base process activities in the software industry and to support and validate the current software process models. As a basis, a superset of 444 base process activities (BPAs) modelled in current process models, such as CMM, ISO 9000, BOOTSTRAP, SPICE and SPRM, were identified. This paper describes the design of the survey, and analyses the findings on software process modelling. Each BPA is characterised and benchmarked on attributes of mean importance and ratios of significance, practice and effectiveness according to the software industry's experience. Based on this work, every BPA and process in current models is now characterised by a set of benchmarked attributes. New process models can be developed and validated based on the benchmarks.