A framework of software process tailoring for small and medium size IT companies

Global software development has brought a number of revolutionary changes in the existing software development practices. Project outsourcing and agile based methodologies have emerged as the new generation of processes and practices. As a result of project outsourcing, small and medium sized software development companies have increased in large number. Due to the limitations of resources these companies are unable to follow traditional heavyweight software engineering approaches and thus follow lightweight agile methodologies. Creating a new process from the scratch in also not possible for them and they prefer to adapt a software process according to their own requirements. The existing works on software process tailoring are very general and superficial and do not provide guidelines to small and medium sized software development companies. This research addresses this issue and presents a process tailoring framework which is based on the critical elements of agile methodologies. Both case study of real projects and survey questionnaires have been used to validate the framework. The initial results show that the framework completely identifies the important elements of projects in small and medium sized companies and derives the schema of process tailoring. The outcome of the research is the lightweight process tailoring framework which generates a process tailoring schema for small and medium sized (SMEs) software development companies.