In addition each process area is composed of a set of key practices whose presence indicates that the developer has implemented and institutionalized the process area:An organization is said to satisfy a key process area only when the process area is both implemented and institutionalized. For illustration, see Example 13.4.
- Commitment to perform: policy, leadership
- Ability to perform: resources, training, orientation, tools, organisational structure
- Activities performed: plans, procedures, work performed, corrective action, tracking
- Measurement and analysis:
- Verifying implementation: reviews, audits
The capability maturity model gave birth to process assessment methods like, Trillium (Canadian telecommunication) and Bootstrap (ESPRIT). The increasing use led the UK Ministry of Defence to propose an international standard for process assessment, SPICE (Software Process Improvement and Capability dEtermination) in 1995.
SPICE is recommended both for process improvement and capability determination. There are two different types of practices:
For an assessment report or profile, see Figure 13.2
- Base practices: are essential activities of a specific process involved in software development; functional, technical view
- customer-supplied: affect the customer directly
- engineering: specify, implement, maintain
- project: establish, coordinate, manage
- support: enable, support performance other proc.
- organization: establish business goals, resources
- Generic practices: institutionalize or implement a process in a general way, i.e., managerial view
- not performed
- performed informally
- planned and tracked
- well-defined
- quantitatively controlled
- continuously improving