Controlling and improving the processes used to develop software has been proposed as a primary remedy to the problems of schedule, over budget and non conformity to requirements in software development. Consequently the software development community has adopted several Software Process Improvement approaches such as the Software Capability Maturity Model published by the SEI as a criterion to evaluate and improve software process maturity. The premise of the Software Capability Maturity Model is that a mature development process will deliver products on time, within budget, requirements and of high quality. Research carried out in developed countries to evaluate the effectiveness of such programmes has confirmed that Software Process Improvement can contribute to the production of high quality software. However, this phenomenon has been less studied in smaller enterprises such as those in Uganda and other developing countries. This study examined the effectiveness of the Software Capability Maturity Model for use in small software developing enterprises and established that the model was difficult to implement in such organizations. Many of its constructs were irrelevant. An adoption model for software capability maturity was designed based on only those factors and constructs of the Software Capability Maturity Model that were found to be relevant to Small and Medium Enterprises. The new model was tested using case study and expert judgment methods. The experts and software developers indicated that the proposed model is more applicable in Small and Medium Enterprises operating in resource constrained countries such as Uganda.

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Requirements Engineering (RE) acts as a conduit between the needs of system users and the capabilities of software produced. Because of this, many Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) have been tempted to invest in improving corresponding processes. Regrettably though, many process improvement approaches for RE do not meet SMEs' needs and are often hard to apply in these companies especially in transitional countries such as Uganda. This study therefore, presents a validation of a Systematic Approach to Requirements Engineering Process Improvement that can be used to enable RE process improvement in SME software companies in transitional countries. The validation was conducted following a design science research approach where four (4) case organizations were used. From the study, it is reported that the approach is indeed easy to use, understandable and is applicable to all kinds of SMEs that would wish to conduct RE process improvement.