Independently from which software process was selected for a company or a project, the selected software process usually cannot be applied without any customization. Although the need to tailor a software process to specific project requirements seems to be widely accepted and unquestioned, the way of doing the tailoring remains unclear and is, therefore, often left to the expertise of process engineers or project managers. What are the criteria to be applied in the tailoring? What are dependencies between different criteria and how should certain criteria influence the software process? In this paper we investigate concrete tailoring criteria for the tailoring of software processes. To this end, we present a collection of 49 tailoring criteria as the outcomes of a systematic literature review. We further analyze the impact of the discovered tailoring criteria by relating them to a set of 20 exemplary tailoring actions, which affect the project-specific software process. Our outcomes show that the factors influencing the tailoring are well understood, however, the consequences of the criteria remain abstract and need to be interpreted on a project-per-project basis.

A comprehensive software development process needs some adjustment before it can be used: It needs to be tailored to the particular organization's and project's setting. The definition of an appropriate tailoring model is a critical task. Process users need tailoring that enables them to trim the process to reflect the actual needs. Process engineers need a method and a tool to define a valid model. The SE Book of T-Systems contains a feature model to describe variable parts of the process model and relations and constraints between these parts. The notation and semantics of feature models can be used to visually author a consistent and valid tailoring model. In this paper we present a tool for visual modeling and validation of process model tailoring based on feature models using the SE Book of T-Systems as an example. The tool is based on a domain-specific language that represents the process model. It leverages the semantics of feature models to provide an easy-to-use editor for tailoring-enabled process models.