Guide to software engineering environment assessment and evaluation
1993
This guide outlines general approaches to software engineering environment assessment and evaluation.This guide defines SEE assessment as the process of accurately describing the capabilities of a software engineering environment to support and integrate a range of CASE tools.The guide defines software engineering environment evaluation as the process of determining how well a SEE matches the customer's requirements.Thus, the evaluation process builds on the assessment process by using the descriptions of software engineering environments capabilities generated by the assessment process to evaluate the software engineering environment with respect to specific customer requirements or criteria.While there are several models of tool assessment, evaluation and selection [e.g., 11, 14, 21, 23], there has been very little work done in assessing or evaluating full software engineering environments or environment frameworks, in part because these are new products [14].The assessment and evaluation approaches presented here focus on accurately defining the integration and functional capabilities of candidate software engineering environments and the requirements of the customer.The NIST/ECMA Framework for Software Engineering Environments [24] and the NGCR PSESWG Reference Model for Project Support Environments[25] provide the definitions of software engineering environment capabilities used in these approaches.Wasserman [28], Thomas and Nejmeh [27] and Brown [3] provide the definitions of integration capacity used to describe the extent of integration present in candidate software engineering environments.The results of the assessment process are accurate descriptions of the capabilities of selected software engineering environments given in terms of accepted definitions or models.The results of the evaluation process are descriptions of how well candidate software engineering environments match the requirements with respect to the needs of the customer organization and compared to other software engineering environments.