Appraisal Assistant-A CMMI appraisal tool/ISO 15504 assessment tool

Appraisal Assistant Beta

About Appraisal Assistant

The Appraisal Assistant is a software application developed by the Software Quality Institute, Griffith University, to support the assessment or appraisal of process capability or organizational maturity. It closely follows approaches consistent with the requirements of ISO/IEC 15504 - Information technology: Process assessment, and the Assessment Requirements for CMMI^®.Unlike other existing tools, Appraisal Assistant takes an explicitly evidence-driven approach to recording the information generated in an assessment. A high-level demonstration of its operation can be found here. The approach is similar to that described here in recording the information generated in an assessment.

The Appraisal Assistant has been used by SQI personnels to perform SCAMPI A/B appraisals and SPICE assessments. The 1st BETA version was used in a pilot appraisal to examine the relationships between ISO 15504-2 and SCAMPI appraisals. The report is available here. Many findings from this case study are now incorporated into the newer version of Appraisal Assistant.

Appraisal Assistant provides:
   - Support for multiple process models - this beta version includes ISO/IEC 15504-5, ISO/IEC 15504-6 (FDIS), Automotive SPICE, CMMI^®-DEV v.1.2, +SAFE, and CMMI^® SE/SW/IPPD/SS V 1.1.
- Support for user defined appraisal models
   - Support for multiple methods of performing assessment / appraisal, including SCAMPI^SM A (v.1.2) and B Class, and generic ISO/IEC 15504 conformant assessment methods.
- Support for user defined assessment methods
   - Support for conversion of results from one framework to another; i.e. expression of CMMI^® Appraisal results as ISO 15504 standard process profiles,and definition of coverage of ISO 9001 requirements by CMMI^® or ISO 15504 assessments / appraisals.
   - Facility to split and consolidate evidence capture activities within the team through the establishment of mini-teams.
   - Automatic generation of a variety of reports, including Appraisal Disclosure Statement, PIID, Assessment Record, Appraisal / Assessment Findings, Strength / Weakness summaries, Rating Profiles, and workload summaries.
   - Automatic reporting of model coverage by collected evidence, to meet the requirements of the SCAMPI^SM A v.1.2 method.

About Beta testing

Individuals and organizations who undertake assessments / appraisals of process capability are invited to participate in the beta testing of this tool. If you wish to participate in beta testing trials you must agree to receive emails about the tool. We will collect some basic data about your background. Once you register, you will receive a Username and Password via email to login and access the download page and feedback forms. At any time, you may login to the feedback page, and either report a defect or provide general feedback.

About Feedback

Apart from providing us defect reports and suggestions, it is a condition of the End User License Agreement that beta testers participate in our usability surveys. You only need to fill out the survey before downloading the updated versions. If you had used Appraisal Assistant in an appraisal/assessment AND you were the team leader, we ask you to provide us the project workload metrics (one per appraisal/assessment). This data file will be generated by Appraisal Assistant. It consists of a set of metrics that will give us a general idea of the appraisal scope and the evidence usage patterns. It does NOT report any ratings, findings or anything descriptive. The data file is in plain text, you are welcome to review it before submitting. This information will be used to support the SQI's ongoing research into the assessment process, aimed at improving the reliability of assessments and reducing the associated resource requirements.

Click here to see an example of project workload metrics

About New releases

When a new release of the tool is ready, all users will be advised by email. We anticipate providing new releases about every six months; the beta release period is expected to continue for two years from the original release.

About Spellcheck dictionary and Thesaurus

The spellchecker in Appraisal Assistant is a modified version of mySpell. Due to license incompatibilities, we can only distribute dictionaries that are under LGPL or BSD. If your language is not included in the setup package, please go to here for the spellcheck dictionary and here for the thesaurus. If you are interested in creating your own dictionary, here is how to do it.

Note: Appraisal Assistant can only use OOo 2.x thesaurus, loading the 1.x thesaurus may crash Appraisal Assistant.

Requirements:
OS: Windows 2000 SP4, Windows XP Home/Pro, Windows XP x64, Windows VISTA, Windows VISTA x64
H/W: 50MB Hard disk space, 32MB memory (depends on the size of the project database), 800x600 VGA, Pentium III-500mhz
Misc: You must have administrator rights to install the application on the computer.

Trademarks and Copyright
   © Appraisal Assistant is copyright 2007 Griffith University
   ^SM SCAMPI is a service mark of Carnegie Mellon University.
   ® CMMI is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by Carnegie Mellon University.

Credits

The Appraisal Assistant was developed by Fred Liang under the guidance of Associate Professor Terry Rout. Angela Tuffley provided important support for its development.

Screenshots (Beta 3)