Accumulating the Body of Evidence for The Payoff of Software Process Improvement - 1997

Improvements in the software process have been going on for several decades. Under the rubric of software engineering, the primary thrust has been better discipline, methods and automated technology to support software development. SPI guided by organizational process maturity principles has emerged in the U.S. in the last 12 years, the charge being led by the SEI (Humphrey, 1989), and now internationally by the emerging ISO SPICE initiative. Achieving a mature process establishes a project management and engineering foundation for quantitative control of the software process, which becomes the basis for continuous process improvement. An organization with a mature process will take full responsibility for executing its planned commitments. In a fully mature software organization, the following holds: • Quality is defined and therefore predictable, • Costs and schedules are predictable and normally met, • Processes are defined and under statistical control, • Roles and responsibilities are clear-interdisciplinary communications are good, • Software measurement discipline is practiced, • Success rides on organizational capability, and individual talent flourishes within that, • Technology that supports the process is used effectively, • Staff development practices for software talent growth are established and effective, • Corporate success factors recognize "core competency" of software as important and software strategy is aligned with the business strategy, • Management and staff are committed to total quality and continuous improvement, and results are obvious. The primary mechanism for achieving maturity and bottom line results in a specific organization is a focused, structured, and institutionalized program of continuous software process improvement. This requires the cyclic application of a model-based improvement method. In addition to a well defined set of improvement objectives, such a method may use one or more of several popular goal oriented models for guiding the improvement program. A successful systematic SPI program requires: • Well defined objectives-some of which are measurable and measured, • A method for catalyzing and institutionalizing the improvement program in an organizational setting, • One or more goal/maturity models for guidance, • Best practice examples and benchmarks to draw from, • An organizational commitment to action in the form of an improvement road map that is defined, resourced and followed, • Expertise in process diagnosis, culture change tactics, process problem solving, etc. • A set of champions/change agents that can sponsor, commit to and effectively implement a planned improvement program. An SPI road map will focus on targeted organizational improvement areas at …