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This study generalizes some of the symptoms of ageing of a legacy system. Each symptom is specified by metrics and the results of the measurements made suggest what operations should be undertaken to renew the software. The study is based on retrospective analysis of data collected during the execution of a large renewal process of a very old legacy system. It therefore provides evidence of the expected efficacy of such renewal processes and can be used to decide how best to plan them and manage them in order to increase their efficacy. It can also be used to define the reengineering requirements to ensure long life to the system despite successive evolutions of the application and the operation domain. The metrics can provide a basis for monitoring a software system to ensure that its quality does not degrade to such an extent that the most costly and risky renewal processes then have to be performed to improve it. Finally, the paper points out the problems with renewal processes that still remain open. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To improve a working process, one or more process components can be replaced by innovative ones. The literature provides a possible source of innovative process components. However, it is often difficult to evaluate whether a particular innovative process component satisfying an improvement goal can be introduced to replace a process component in the working software process to be improved. In previous works, the authors of this paper proposed a characterization and evaluation framework to address the above problem. To improve the usability of the framework, a scenario was defined for each question to help the user answer it methodically. The experiment presented in this paper aims to verify if a scenario-based reading technique improves the usability of the framework. The results obtained show that the technique proposed makes assessment of which process components of a working process are candidates for making innovation more reliable. Moreover, the scenario-based reading technique is user independent and only a little training may be sufficient to sensibly improve the effectiveness of use of the scenarios. The trustworthy results of this technique and its independence of the user's previous knowledge and ability ensure that it can be applied methodically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ISO has recently published Part 7 of the ISO/IEC 15504 standard, with the aim of determining the extent to which an organization consistently implements processes that contribute to achievement of its business goals. This new Part 7 of ISO/IEC 15504 has addressed issues related to the assessment of organizational maturity, as the CMMI-DEV model also does. Recently, growing interest has been shown towards the need to harmonize different improvement models or standards, thereby presenting an integrated vision about them. All this being so and in an effort to offer information on how the maturity levels described in these two models are related, we have carried out the harmonization of these two models. It is based, firstly, on a mapping between processes of ISO 12207:08 and process areas of CMMI-DEV, and in second place, on a matching between processes of ISO 12207:08 and ISO 15504-5. For this work, we have taken into account the latest versions of the models, and defined a suitable process to carry out the mapping in a systematic way. We established differences and similarities between the maturity levels (and their processes) described in these models, our goal being to support organizations which are interested in tackling organizational maturity. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]