A comparative study of SPI Approaches with ProPAM

Software process improvement (SPI) is one of the main software development challenges. Unfortunately, process descriptions generally do not correspond to the processes actually performed during software development projects. They just represent high-level plans and do not contain the information necessary for the concrete software projects. This deficient alignment between the process and project is caused by processes that are unrelated to project activities and failure in detecting project changes to improve the process. Process and project alignment is essential to really find out how process management is important to achieve an organization's strategic objectives. Considering this approach, this paper presents a comparative study of some of the most recognized SPI approaches and a new software process improvement methodology proposed, designed by Process and Project Alignment Methodology (ProPAM). Our intention is to show the problems observed in existing SPI approach and recognize that further research in process and project alignment based on actor oriented approaches is required.