Software process definition and improvement are frequent strategies followed by
software companies in order to enhance software quality and boost development
productivity. Software processes are used for guiding development teams while
executing projects, and also as a basis for project planning and monitoring.
There are some tools available for software process definition and a plethora
of tools for project management with support for project planning and
monitoring. These tools are usually not integrated so project plans are made
manually possibly introducing inconsistencies with respect to the process they
are based on. Moreover, when project management is not performed using an
integrated tool, plan and trace also differ. Measuring process execution is a
common path for SPI. To this end, matching tasks in the process, plan and trace
is needed to understand where the process fails and how it might be improved.
Inconsistencies among these artifacts hinders SPI since manually matching tasks
demands a large effort. In this paper we define an approach for process-based
project management that reduces these inconsistencies. We present CASPLE, a
tool that supports this approach, and we illustrate its application in
PowerData, a small Chilean company. A case study of applying the approach and
CASPLE in four of our industrial partners is also presented.