Spago4Q in nutshell

The platform

Spago4Q (SpagoBI for Quality) is a platform for maturity assessment, effectiveness of development software process and quality inspection of the released software: this goal is achieved by evaluating data and measures collected from the project management and development tools with non-invasive techniques.

Spago4Q architecture, obtained as a verticalization of SpagoBI (the Business Intelligence Free Platform SpagoBI) is designed in order to be easily adapted to complex organizational contexts. It integrates an advanced meta-model which makes Spago4Q fully independent from the adopted software development processes, infrastructure tools, measurement and assessment frameworks. Spago4Q supports companies and organizations both in the certification process and, more in general, in monitoring a formalized development process.

Capabilities

• Open system and compliance to "de facto" standards
• highly adaptability to various organizational contexts
• measurement process not bound to the adopted software development process and tools
• automatic data collection from a set of tools
• support for a complex system of evaluation
• measurement's knowledge base: set of "library of measurements" and meta-model instances to satisfy the needs of end users, providing a low cost "out of the box" solution

Architectural overview

The ETL (Extract Transform Load) procedures extract data from the infrastructure tools and load them into the DWH-Spago4Q datawarehouse module, based on a meta-model definition. In order to complete the assessment process, data inserted in the datawarehouse have to be analyzed by the Spago4Q analytical component. This module has been implemented as a verticalization of SpagoBI, in order to cover and satisfy the whole range of BI requirements, both in terms of analysis and data management, administration and security. Using SpagoBI platform to implement the Spago4Q analytical components make easy to represent every KPIs, metrics and the related thresholds as an instance of a particular analytical document type offered by SpagoBI itself (report, OLAP, dashboard, data mining, free enquiry, geo-referenced analysis).

Spago4Q includes a configurable set of dashboards, reports and OLAP documents to monitor process like: requirements management, bugs and issue tracking, test, risk management, version control.

All the components described above can be properly configured through the Configuration & Administration module that provides the following characteristics: definition of connections to repositories and tools; access control list; thresholds values management; privacy protection management.

The Spago4Q modular architecture and meta-model design guarantees extensibility towards others infrastructure tools and to further sets of activity measure areas.

The Meta-model

Spago4Q meta-model follows the Meta-Object Facility (MOF) approach proposed by Object Management Group (OMG). In Spago4Q, three major meta-model components have been identified: Process, Measurement, and Assessment meta-models.

The Process Meta-model has been defined starting from a simplified version of the OMG's SPEM (Software Process Engineering Meta-model) specifications, which describes a concrete software development process.

The Measurement meta-model has been defined following the Goal-Question-Metric (GQM) paradigm. Following GQM principles, the meta-model defines three main entities:

• measurableConcept: the goals of the analysis, i.e the concepts to measure
• measurableAttribute: the attributes to be measured for evaluating a specific goal
• KPI (Key Process Indicator) and metric: the operations to apply on measured attributes

The Assessment Meta-model fully supports CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) as assessment framework. Therefore, the keeping of CMMI practices is monitored by specific KPIs and metrics, examining their values with respect to predefined thresholds. Spago4Q gives at a glance a reliable snapshot of company state and allows managers and assessors to monitor the adherence of CMMI goals.

By means of the meta-model it is possible to represent:

• specific development processes (e.g.: UP, SCRUM, waterfall, evolutionary )
• assessment framework (CMMI, ISO 9001:2000)
• activity measure areas (e.g.: requirements, bugs and issues, testing, risks)

Introduction to the demo

The demo environment includes all Spago4Q features for users and administrators. All the ETL procedures, to extract data from tools and load them into datawarehouse, are not active.

The datawarehouse is loaded with some sample data and will be restored every night, so you can insert or modify data but please never delete it because you could interfere with the proper functioning of the demo.

The first Spago4Q release is focalized on the evaluation of the software development processes and particularly on the sub-processes: requirements, bugs and test. The demo KPIs, for these sub-processes, are directly calculated on the provided datawarehouse information.

The available demo suggests just one possible way on how to organize KPIs presentation, the proposed classification is in Business, Process, Product, Resource areas. This kind of classification has been chosen because it's compliant with different types of processes or services as software development, business, application management.

The user access is basically for general manager, quality manager or, project manager.

By clicking on "ProjectView" portal page you can browse through the pages that show you KPIs related to software process development grouped in Business, Process, Product and Resource areas. All KPIs are directly calculated from the data contained in the datawarehouse except for those which are marked as "fake diagrams". These ones have been inserted only to give a complete idea of the whole environment.

Free Open Source Software

Released under the GNU LGPL license, Spag4Q is hosted by OW2 Consortium. It's a free open source project: no enterprise or professional edition!