An investigation into the best practices for the successful design and implementation of lightweight software process assessment methods: A systematic literature review

Software process assessment (SPA) is an effective tool to understand an organization's process quality and to explore improvement opportunities. However, the knowledge that underlies the best practices required to develop assessment methods, either lightweight or heavyweight methods, is unfortunately scattered throughout the literature. This paper presents the results of a systematic literature review to organize those recognized as the best practices in a way that helps SPA researchers and practitioners in designing and implementing their assessment methods. Such practices are presented in the literature as assessment requirements, success factors, observations, and lessons learned. Consequently, a set of 38 best practices has been collected and classified into five main categories, namely practices related to SPA methods, support tools, procedures, documentation, and users. While this collected set of best practices is important for designing lightweight as well as heavyweight assessment methods, it is of utmost importance in designing lightweight assessment methods, as the design of which depends on individual experience. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.