Improving Software Process Improvement

0 7 4 0 7 4 5 9 / 0 2 / $ 1 7 . 0 0 © 2 0 0 2 I E E E ISO 9000, the Capability Maturity Model,1,2 Spice (Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination, also known as ISO/IEC 15504), and Bootstrap to promote mature software development practices. The CMM has been supplemented with the Ideal improvement model, the Personal Software Process, and Team CMM. Most of these frameworks have become well known among practitioners and researchers. In the US, more than 1,000 CMM-based assessments have been carried out. From 1994 to 2000, the Commission of the European Union funded more than 450 so-called process improvement experiments (PIEs) through its European Systems and Software Initiative (ESSI). Despite the amount of resources spent on these improvement efforts, several critical issues are still open, as the many ongoing initiatives, projects, and standardization efforts testify. In particular, evaluating whether an assessment and consequent improvement plan have had a causal, significant, and positive impact on company success is difficult. Certainly, some studies show that process assessment techniques benefit software development organizations.3 In reality, these positive effects are not so evident. Some researchers claim that most improvement initiatives have had limited success.4 Further, companies such as Microsoft have developed successful commercial software without adhering to external process standards or pursuing ambitious improvement initiatives. The problems go deeper than just needing to downsize and tailor SPI frameworks. As the Spice and CMM experience has shown, rather than just repair and adjust the process (model), we should also question some underlying assumptions and refocus SPI to be more companyand user-oriented. Indeed, one of the basic SPI-QA (quality assurance) assumptions is that “the quality of a softfocus