IRQA & CMMI

CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) describes the best practices, already applied in the industry, to develop, maintain and acquire products and services. It provides a framework that allows to assess the level of maturity in an organization or its capability in relation with the processes it performs, to set priorities in order to put into practice the improvements that have to be carried out and to realize those improvements.

In the last few years, CMMI has acquired enormous importance as a quality system in the systems industry, and can practically be considered the de facto standard in this area. Nevertheless, CMMI can be applied to different areas, such as systems engineering, hardware, etc.

Requirements Engineering is the discipline responsible for defining the activities that will manage the needs of the users of a system and ensure that the final product meets these in the best way possible.In CMMI for Development there are two process areas directly related to Requirements Engineering:
 

• Requirements Management (REQM)
• Requirements Development (RD)

Nevertheless, there are many other process areas in which requirements play a more or less relevant role.

BENEFITS

A Requirements Engineering process supported by IRQA includes not only activities specific to requirements management, such as the unambiguous identification of requirements, versioning, traceability, etc. but also others such as definition of business models and interfaces, and the identification of functionalities of the system to be developed. The management of these activities within the same tool is a significant advantage as it helps participants in the project to maintain an overall, integrated vision of all activities as part of a cyclic and iterative process.

Additionally, the use of IRQA as a support for the implementation of CMMI has many benefits as it allows to automate part of the processes, ensuring fulfillment of processes even in moments of stress, such as it is required in the description of CMMI level 2 (Managed).

In fact, already in CMMI for Development level 2, among the resources considered as necessary to support the activities, as one of the “typical work products”, it is recommended to use a tool to monitor and trace requirements. The reason for this is that manual maintenance is so costly that the risk of abandoning best practice is very high if such a tool is not available.
 

For maturity level 3 (Defined), the organization must have general processes defined, which will be tailored to the different projects as needed. Also, the use of IRQA facilitates the implementation of requirements processes at level 3, as it helps to standardise and harmonise the application of processes along the company.

For maturity levels 4 (Quantitatively Managed) and 5 (Optimizing), It is also of interest here the use of a tool, as quantitative management is not possible without the storage of data that can subsequently be exploited for the calculation of metrics and the development of performance models or process behavioural models.

IRQA & SPICE

IRQA is a state-of-the-art Requirements Definition and Management (RDM) tool specifically designed to provide integral support to the complete Requirements process. It allows the ISO/IEC 15504 SPICE compliance, which is applied to the entire software lifecycle in the process related directly or indirectly to the requirements.

A complete Engineering Requirements Process supported by IRQA includes not only the management requirements activities, (such as the requirements identification, versioning, traceability, etc…) but also activities that are more related to development requirements, such as the business models definition, interface definition, features definition, test case identification, etc… The integrated management of these activities in a single tool, IRQA, means an important benefit, since it allows the stakeholders to maintain an integrated vision of all of them as part of a unique process, cyclical and iterative.

BENEFITS

IRQA covers the entire requirements lifecycle, such as the requirements capture, analysis, specification and validation as well as state-of-the-art Management capabilities.

• Management Requirements: requirements identification, versioning, traceability, etc…

• Development Requirements: business models definition, interfaces definition, features definition, test case identification…

• Integrated management of these activities in a single tool, IRQA, means an important benefit since it allows the stakeholders to maintain a integrated vision of all of them as part of a unique process, cyclical and iterative.
   

Kybele Consulting has conducted a survey of the IRQA maintenance of the rule ISO/IEC 15504 SPICE which is applied to the complete software lifecycle. For this, a scale has been defined. It represents the relationship grade between the model ISO/IEC 12207:2008 model and IRQA functionalities.
 

The survey highlights that IRQA is a great option during stage 2 – implementation-. This solution meets almost all the processes related to the Engineering Requirements (User Requirements Definition Process, System Requirements Definition Process, Software Requirements Definition Process) as well as performance as a support to other processes related indirectly to the requirements, such as verification and validation, set up management or quality assurance. The following picture shows the meeting grade for every process.
 

Figure 1. SPICE Compliance using IRQA

It is important to highlight the rich cover that IRQA presents for all the outcomes that belong to different process, so that IRQA ease SPICE implementation.