In order to improve and sustain their competitiveness over time, organisations nowadays need to undertake different initiatives to adopt frameworks, models and standards that will allow them to align and improve their business processes. In spite of these efforts, organisations may still encounter governance and management problems. This is whereRisk Management (RM)can play a major role, since its purpose is to contribute to the creation and preservation of value in the context of the organisation's processes. RM is a complex and subjective activity that requires experience and a high level of knowledge about risks, and it is for this reason that standardisation institutions and researchers have made great efforts to define initiatives to overcome these challenges. However, the RM field nevertheless presents a lack of uniformity in its terms and concepts, due to the different contexts and scopes of application, a situation that can generate ambiguities and misunderstandings. To address these issues, this paper aims to present an ontology calledSRMO (Software Risk Management Ontology), which seeks to unify the terms and concepts associated with RM and provide an integrated and holistic view of risk. In doing so, the Pipeline framework has been applied in order to assure and verify the quality of the proposed ontology, and it has been implemented in Protégé and validated by means of competency questions. Three application scenarios of this ontology demonstrating their usefulness in the software engineering field are presented in this paper. We believe that this ontology can be useful for organisations that are interested in: (i) establishing an RM strategy from an integrated approach, (ii) defining the elements that help to identify risks and the criteria that support decision-making in risk assessment, and (iii) helping the involved stakeholders during the process of risk management.

SUMMARY Software maintenance is an important, indeed vital, activity for software companies. For many organizations, including small firms, it is also a business opportunity. In the quest to help companies of this type, for whom strengthening their maintenance process is a chief concern, we present Agile_MANTEMA. This is a methodological proposal for software maintenance, one which focuses on small companies. The methodology defines an agile maintenance strategy, setting out in detail what is to be carried out, when, how and by whom; that is to say, it seeks to give a detailed guide for the implementation of the maintenance process in these kinds of companies. Agile_MANTEMA also establishes a set of elements, such as types of maintenance, service levels and capability levels, which aim to: (i) handle the complexity that is inherent to the maintenance process and (ii) allow a small company to define its own maintenance process, taking into account its particular characteristics and needs. In an effort to improve their maintenance process, two small firms conducted an improvement project in which Agile_MANTEMA was used. The experiences reported by these companies tell us that this methodology offers a strategy that can be useful, practical and suitable for small companies as they tackle software maintenance. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

There are many companies doing software development in a distributed way nowadays, due to the great benefits that it provides, however, this type of development also leads to multiple complications such as deteriorated communications. Among the most widespread methodologies for software development is the Rational Unified Process (RUP). However, in recent decades a series of methodologies have emerged, called "agile methodologies", which aim to develop software quickly, focusing on people and frequent delivery of software. Of the existing agile methodologies, Scrum is one of the most widely-applied, due to its ability to complement other methods and processes. For this reason, the strategies proposed by Scrum may be suitable for the distributed management and deployment of the phases and disciplines of RUP. In this paper we present a methodology based on the integration of RUP and Scrum, called scRumUP, which has been so designed as to be appropriate in a distributed environment.

Abstract ISO has recently published Part 7 of the ISO/IEC 15504 standard, with the aim of determining the extent to which an organization consistently implements processes that contribute to achievement of its business goals. This new Part 7 of ISO/IEC 15504 has addressed issues related to the assessment of organizational maturity, as the CMMI‐DEV model also does. Recently, growing interest has been shown towards the need to harmonize different improvement models or standards, thereby presenting an integrated vision about them. All this being so and in an effort to offer information on how the maturity levels described in these two models are related, we have carried out the harmonization of these two models. It is based, firstly, on a mapping between processes of ISO 12207:08 and process areas of CMMI‐DEV, and in second place, on a matching between processes of ISO 12207:08 and ISO 15504‐5. For this work, we have taken into account the latest versions of the models, and defined a suitable process to carry out the mapping in a systematic way. We established differences and similarities between the maturity levels (and their processes) described in these models, our goal being to support organizations which are interested in tackling organizational maturity. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.