Identifying criteria for designing a process architecture in a multimodel environment

Software organizations are moving to a process oriented approach to develop its products. Many improvement technologies have emerged as a response in a multimodel environment. The term improvement technology is used to refer in general to the long list of reference models, standards, best practices, regulatory policies and other types of practices that an organization may use simultaneously (i.e. CMMI, ISO 15504, ISO 9001, Bootstrap and others). The simultaneous use of multiple improvement technologies is causing many problems such as the handling of heterogeneous improvement technologies for deriving processes. Although process architecture has been considered as a means for harmonizing these technologies and assisting process stakeholders do their job, it is unclear how to design a process architecture that supports a multimodel environment. In this article, we identify and analyze main problems in a multimodel environment and critical issues in process architecture area. As a result of this, we derive a set of criteria, as groundwork to design a process architecture in a multimodel environment.