A survey has been designed to seek the practical foundation of base process activities (BPAs) in the software industry and to support research in modelling the software engineering processes. A superset of BPAs compatible with the current software process models, such as SPICE (ISO 15504), CMM, ISO 9000 and BOOTSTRAP, were identified for the construction of the questionnaires. This paper reports the survey findings on BPAs in software engineering processes. A summary of the current software engineering process techniques and practices modelled by 83 BPAs in 10 processes and three categories is given. Each BPA is benchmarked on attributes of mean importance and ratios of significance, practice and effectiveness. Based on the benchmarks, and by comparing with the current practice of the reader's organization, recommendations can be given on which specific areas need to have processes established first, and which areas should be highest priority for process improvement.

In the aviation industry, each aircraft is equipped with flight recorders. The scheme of this paper is that the same idea can be introduced in each copy of software. Once a software black-box mechanism is incorporated into a copy of a software product, the data used for software maintenance can be collected in real time. The software black-box information can be fed back to the producer at any time when needed, especially after the beta test period, when the software has experienced several crashes or problems, and before a new release. The analysis of the black-box data can provide information for software crash diagnosis and software usage maintenance testing