Tool supported detection and judgment of nonconformance in process execution

In the past decades the software engineering community has proposed a large collection of software development life cycles, models, and processes. The goal of a major set of these processes is to assure that the product is finished within time and budget, and that a predefined set of functional and nonfunctional requirements (e.g. quality goals) are satisfied at delivery time. Based upon the assumption that there is a real relationship between the process applied and the characteristics of the product developed from that process, we developed a tool supported approach that uses process nonconformance detection to identify potential risks in achieving the required process characteristics. In this paper we present the approach and a feasibility study that demonstrates its use on a large-scale software development project in the aerospace domain. We demonstrate that our approach, in addition to meeting the criteria above, can be applied to a real system of reasonable size; can represent a useful and adequate set of rules of relevance in such an environment; and can detect relevant examples of process nonconformance that provide useful insight to the project manager.