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Taking into account the key role of software and systems in today’s society, it is rather surprising their development process is not regarded as satisfactory (Standish Group, 2015). Software and Systems Process Improvement (SPI) being a technique to implement improvement activities to achieve better results within development represents a way of brightening such situation. A variety of models, industry-specific standards and methodologies have already been developed for assessment and improvement of software and system development processes. The use of these tools is motivated by the assumption that quality of a product is dependent on the process utilized for its development (Afzal, Alone, Glocksien, & Torkar, 2016). The current state of the art in SPI is presented in (Kuhrmann, Diebold, & Münch, 2016) together with the emerging topics, e.g., SPI for very small and medium-sized companies, and SPI in the context of lean and agile methods. Software and Systems Process Improvement in very small companies is subject of interest in a number of publications, e.g. (Pino, Pardo, García, & Piattini, 2010; Sulayman, Mendes, Urquhart, Riaz, & Tempero, 2014; Sulayman, Urquhart, Mendes, & Seidel, 2012). Other publications focus on the description and usage of the ISO/IEC 29110 series of systems and software engineering standards and guides aimed at improving life cycle processes in Very Small Entities (VSEs) recently developed and started to be implemented worldwide (Laporte, Munoz, Miranda, & O’Connor, 2018). Experience gained from the pilot projects of the ISO/IEC 29110 standard implementations has been published (Laporte & O’Connor, 2016; O’Connor, 2014; Paucar, Laporte, Arteaga, & Bruggmann, 2015) showing that the implementation has been predominantly successful, however with certain issues arising. One of these issues is an insufficient support for software quality assurance processes which have now become a mandatory part of software and systems development (Spinellis, 2017). The growing importance of software quality assurance processes has been confirmed both in practice (Kuhrmann, Garousi, Felderer, & Herkiloglu, 2017) and research (Garousi & Mäntylä, 2016). Moreover, several software test process improvement approaches have been developed to help organizations in assessing and improving their testing processes, where TMMi® has become the de-facto standard for software test process improvement around the globe. Furthermore, the ISO/IEC 29119 series focused on software testing has been published filling the gap of a traditionally poor coverage of testing within standards (Afzal et al., 2016).
The goal of this paper is to help VSEs that are implementing the ISO/IEC 29110 Software Basic Profile to improve their software test processes. The paper thus presents the results of a process mapping between the ISO/IEC 29110 Software Basic Profile and software testing standards. The outputs, i.e. mapping tables and ArchiMate model, can be used by very small entities in practice to achieve desired quality of software test processes.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. First, the ISO/IEC 29110 series is briefly described followed by the introduction of the ISO/IEC 29119 series of testing standards and TMMi®. Then, the research methodology is explained. In the next section, the mapping of the ISO/IEC 29110 Software Basic Profile to test processes is described. Finally, concluding remarks are discussed.