This article describes an empirical study in industry of requirements engineering process maturity assessment and improvement. Our aims were to evaluate a requirements engineering process maturity model and to assess if improvements in requirements engineering process maturity lead to business improvements. We first briefly describe the process maturity model that we used and modifications to this model to accommodate process improvement. We present initial maturity assessment results for nine companies, describe how process improvements were selected and present data on how RE process maturity changed after these improvements were introduced. We discuss how business benefits were assessed and the difficulties of relating process maturity improvements to these business benefits. All companies reported business benefits and satisfaction with their participation in the study. Our conclusions are that the RE process maturity model is useful in supporting maturity assessment and in identifying process improvements and there is some evidence to suggest that process improvement leads to business benefits. However, whether these business benefits were a consequence of the changes to the RE process or whether these benefits resulted from side-effects of the study such as greater self-awareness of business processes remains an open question.

Legacy systems are often business critical and are associated with high maintenance costs. In this paper, we present an overview of a method, Renaissance, which aims to manage the process of regaining control over such systems. Renaissance supports system evolution by first recovering a stable basis using reengineering, and subsequently continuously improving the system by a stream of incremental changes. In both cases, the extent of evolution is determined by a phase which takes into account of technical, business, and organisational factors. Renaissance defines a process framework, a predefined number of evolution strategies, an information repository, and a generic set of personnel responsibilities. The method can be tailored to the needs of particular projects and organisations, and it is not prescriptive of particular tools and techniques.