SPICE: An Empiricist's Perspective

The SPICE project aims to deliver an international standard for software process assessment by the end of 1996. As part of this project there is an empirical trials phase whose purpose is to ascertain the effectiveness of the prospective SPICE standard. Two of the objectives of the trials phase are: (a) to determine the extent to which SPICEconformant assessments are repeatable (i.e., reliability), and (b) to determine the extent to which SPICE-conformant assessments are really measuring best software process practices (i.e., validity). This paper introduces the theoretical foundations for evaluating the reliability and validity of measurement, suggests some empirical research methods for investigating them in SPICE, and discusses the constraints and limitations of these methods within the context of the SPICE project.