A family of experiments to validate metrics for software process models

Process modelling is a key activity of software process management and it is the starting point for enacting, evaluating and improving software processes. The current competitive marketplace calls for the continuous improvement of processes and therefore, it is fundamental to have software process models with a high maintainability. In this paper we introduce a set of metrics for software process models and discuss how these can be used as maintainability indicators. In particular, we report the results of a family of experiments that assess relationships between the structural properties, as measured by the defined metrics, of the process models and their maintainability.