Bridging the gap between ISO/IEC 15504 conformant process assessment and organizational reuse enhancement

Improving reuse in industrial engineering is more and more recognized as a key to economic success by solution providers. It generally increases the quality of the engineered systems, shortens engineering time, and decreases engineering costs for the development of customer-specific solutions. We therefore developed an integrated set of methods for assessing an organization's reuse practices, identifying its reuse potential and guiding the selection and implementation of improvement actions. While the assessment of reuse practices is performed according to the principles of ISO/IEC 15504 for process assessment, identification of improvements for reuse in industrial engineering is much more complex compared to 'traditional' process capability-oriented improvement. Orthogonal to improving along the process capability dimension it also involves strategic decisions on the overall design of the engineering process, the pursued engineering and reuse paradigms, the desired organizational reuse maturity stages, etc. To tackle this problem, we developed a potentials analysis method that assures compliance of the improvements with the strategic goals of the organization. It bridges the gap between the process assessment and the improvement action planning parts of the methodology by supporting the selection of reuse practices considering strategic issues, business goals, etc.