Assessment in the development process

Humane assessment is a method that calls for making the effort of assessment explicit during this development process. But is this needed in all development processes?

Yes. Assessment is an activity we do all the time during the entire development process. Every time we scrutinize a software artifact to figure out what to do next, we are actually performing an assessment. This happens equally both in a classic heavyweight process and in an agile one.

The core idea of the method is for engineers to craft and rely on tailored tools. This offers a general guideline for approaching assessment in a systematic way. However, to get the method effective in the reality of software development, we need to take a step further and integrate it in subprocesses of the overall development process.


Assessment must always have a problem at the center. Depending on the nature of this problem, there are at least three distinct ways to integrate the method in the development process: