Abstract. Process improvement activities in small and medium size enterprises (SME) are challenging due to small number of personnel and projects, people have to perform in a variety of roles. Assigning process improvement activities to the overburdened personnel may be seen as a threat to ongoing projects. Both management and staff should become convinced of the benefits of the improvement actions before taking the first step of the process. Even in this situation the software inspection provides a tempting starting point for process improvement. It is a focused and well defined subprocess and enables high return on investment benefits even in short period use. Our experiment in a small software company confirms that software inspection provides the justified starting point for process improvement. By means of the inspection maturity model the company recognises the weak points in their review practice and inspection patterns help in discovery of improvement actions.

The quality of a software product depends largely on the quality of the process that is used to develop it. In small software companies, the development process may be informal or even ad hoc, which causes uncertainty and variation in the product quality. However, quality issues are as important in small companies as in their larger counterparts. To sustain their dynamics and competitiveness, small organizations need to concentrate on the most effective quality assurance methods.Software inspection is a proven method for improving product quality and it provides a very costeffective way for small companies to improve their development processes. This study introduces a framework for adjusting the inspection process for the organization's specific needs and evaluating its capabilities. The main focus of this work, however, is on refining and improving the inspection process. The improvement is guided by concrete instructions that are documented as process patterns. The pattern approach has already been used successfully in several other areas of software engineering. Patterns aim at capturing the best practices of software development and transferring this knowledge between people or organizations.The framework for inspection process capability originates from the literature relating to different types of peer review methods and experiments with flexible and tool-supported inspections in small companies. Furthermore, generic process improvement models are studied to find a feasible structure for the framework. As a result of the analysis, the i3 capability model is introduced. The feasibility of the model has been investigated in real-life software organizations carrying out inspections.After the capability evaluation, the inspection process can be upgraded with the aid of improvement patterns, which provide structured and easy-to-follow guidelines for implementing improvements. An initial list of patterns, describing solutions to the most common problems confronted in the establishment of inspections, is extracted from related inspection research and an industrial experiment.The contributions of this study are, first, the new view of the inspection process, based on the fundamental activities that are performed during an inspection instead of a series of stages, as it is usually presented. An activity-based process description enables tailoring of the process for organization-specific needs and its targeted improvement. Second, the study introduces a practical, lightweight method for implementing the improvement. Patterns are especially suitable in companies where resources are limited and full-scale improvement programmes cannot be initiated. Furthermore, the generic process improvement models do not provide detailed information on how improvements should be carried out, and the pattern approach represents a promising method for that. Third, the inspection process currently does not have a very significant role in generic software process improvement models; this study helps in outlining the importance ...