PROLES : a customized process applied to software engineering laboratories and Small Business.

Abstract

Most micro and small software development companies do not invest in improving the development-lifecycle processes. Given this, many researchers and software engineers have made proposals for software development processes with lower implementation costs and greater use of human and material resources. In general, it is required that work in academic laboratories be carried out in shorter deadlines, having groups of students practice techniques, such as different methodologies of requirements specification and fast responses to changes, ensuring the assertiveness in the value of deliveries of their projects. In this work, we customized the RUP and adopted Scrum practices, creating a new process called PROLES. PROLES was evaluated in a small company and also in a Software Engineering undergraduate course. PROLES has new particularities that differentiate it from the state of the art, such as a traceability matrix and a reference architecture. Such a matrix is obtained by the reference architecture, serving as a representation of the relationship among requirements and one or more system implementation components. The experimental results prove that PROLES can be adopted as an alternative to a systematic and less-intrusive process.