Adept: A Unified Assessment Method for Small Software Companies

Software process assessments are typically the first step to commencing software process improvement. Small software companies find that many assessment methods are linked to plan-driven improvement models and can be expensive in terms of the resources required. The authors support these claims with statistics from the Irish software industry and present a lightweight assessment method called Adept. Adept unifies an existing plan-driven assessment method and an adapted, risk-based agility/discipline assessment method. Adept has a low resource overhead and does not dictate either a plan-driven or agile process improvement model, making it an attractive assessment method for small software companies