SPICE: The Theory and Practice of Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination / Edition 1

by Khaled El Emam, Jean-Normand Drouin, Walcélio Melo, Alec Dorling

Overview

The SPICE (Software Process Improvement and Capability dEtermination) Project is a joint effort by the ISO and IEC to create an international standard for software process assessment. This book covers both the theory of SPICE and its practical applications, including the lessons learned from the SPICE trials. It includes a valuable automated tool on CD-ROM to help you apply the concepts presented in the book.

The text shows the evolution of the most recent developments in the SPICE project. It documents the major products and the empirical evaluations that have been conducted thus far. The book is jointly written by the key experts involved in the SPICE project. The theory chapters describe the rationale behind the architecture and the contents of the V1.0 and V2.0 document set and how to interpret them. The remaining chapters describe the applications and how that make use of the theory behind them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780818677984
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	11/13/1997
Series:	Systems , #7
Edition description:	BK&CD ROM
Pages:	496
Product dimensions:	7.60(w) x 9.50(h) x 1.33(d)

About the Author

Khaled El Emam obtained his PhD from the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, King's College, the University of London (UK) in 1994. He was previously a research scientist at the Centre de recherche informatique de Montreal (CRIM) in Canada. Currently he is the head of the Quantitative Methods Group at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering in Germany. El Emam is also the founding and current editor of the IEEE TCSE Software Process Newsletter.
He is a member of the Core Trials Team of ISO's SPICE Project, which is empirically evaluating the emerging International Standard. He has previously worked in both small and large software research and development projects for organizations such as Toshiba International Company and Honeywell Control Systems. He has published more than forty articles on software engineering measurement, empirical evaluation in software engineering, software process improvement, and requirements engineering.

Jean-Normand Drouin has more than 12 years experience as a software engineer at Bell Canada, the largest Telecom company in Canada. He is a Trillium author and assessor (Trillium is Bell Canada's own Software Process Assessment method for the Telecommunications industry). He is also the SPICE Technical Center Manager for Canada, Central and South America, as well as one of the first SPICE assessors.

Alec Dorling is the international SPICE Project Manager. He is currently resident at IVF's Centre for Software Engineering in Sweden. Previously he was the International and Strategic Project Manager at the European Software Institute (ESI) in Spain.
Alec is a Chartered Engineer with 25 years experience in the software industry gained both in real-time and commercial systems environments. He is an internationally-recognized expert in the field of Software Quality Management and Process Improvement.
Alec has been involved with most of the UK Government's initiatives in software engineering and software quality over the years, including the STARTS program, the Software Tools Demonstration Centre, the Software Engineering Solutions program, the Quality Management Library, and TickIT. He has also been consultant to the Software Quality Unit of the UK Department of Trade and Industry providing advise on priorities for government action on Software Quality, Standards, and Certification . He carried out the initial studies for the UK Ministry of Defence which were a precursor to the launch of the SPICE Project.

Read an Excerpt

SPICE

The Theory and Practice of Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination

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John Wiley & Sons

ISBN: 0-8186-7798-8

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Chapter One

Introduction to Software Engineering Standards

Francois Coallier ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7 Secretary, Bell Canada, Canada

Prof. Motoei Azuma ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7/WG6 Convenor, Waseda University, Japan

The SPICE Project is an activity of Working Group (WG) 10 of Subcommittee (SC) 7 of the Joint Technical Committee (JTC) 1 of the International Organization for Standards (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).

The purpose of this chapter is to describe the context of international standardization activities in which the SPICE documents are being developed.

International standardization

Types of standardization activities

Standards are developed by groups of individuals or organizations to harmonize product specifications, interfaces, processes, terminology, and so on. Standards cover a wide range of topics and are recognized by various groups of individuals and countries.

Standards are-and should-be developed in response to a user, organization, or market need. Some standards are developed in a formal fashion by organizations that are mandated to do so, while others impose themselves on the market.

There are five basic types of standards:

1. Organization standards: internal company standards (for example)

2. Market standards: standards that become such because of the market preponderance of a product (for example, the Microsoft Windows Application Programming Interface and the VHS videotape standards)

3. Professional standards: standards developed by professional organizations, such as the IEEE, based on professional consensus

4. Industrial standards: standards developed by industrial associations, where the consensus is at the level of each industrial member (for example, the CD-V videodisk and the CDIF CASE tool interface standards)

5. International standards: standards developed by international standards bodies, based on international consensus, where the membership consists of national organizations (such as ISO, IEC, ITU)

Standards, in general, represent a consensus. This representation means that, for standards' types 3, 4, and 5 above, a substantial majority of individuals, organizations, and/or countries have reached an agreement, usually by compromising on their initial positions. As a result, standards are generally less than technically perfect or optimal from an idealistic perspective.

The value of standards does not decrease, however. On the contrary, standards are an ideal medium to communicate:

terminology

procedures

models

benchmarks

The last item is rather significant: a standard can also be a benchmark since it represents the lowest common denominator to which consensus could be attained.

International standardization activities

There are many international standards organizations. Some are focused on regional groupings of countries or trade groups, such as the European Union (for example, CEN), while others have a wider international scope. This latter category either has organizations linked to the United Nations or are self-standing organizations, such as the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Of particular interest to the reader are two of these organizations: ISO and IEC.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) was founded on 23rd February 1947. The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) was founded in 1906. Both these organizations had mandates from their respective members to put into place an international standardization framework to facilitate commerce and international exchanges of goods and services. While IEC was initially concentrating on, as its name suggests, standards in the electrical and electronic engineering fields, ISO was founded to address other topics.

In 1987, ISO and IEC decided to establish a Joint Technical Committee (JTC), with the mandate of elaborating Information Technology (IT) standards.

This Joint Technical Committee, still unique and known as Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC1), has presently 19 active Subcommittees (SCs). They are listed in Appendix A, along with their areas of responsibilities.

Software engineering standards

The first standard to be published in the area of software engineering was a US military standard on software quality assurance in 1972. The publication of this standard was followed in 1976 by an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standard on Software Quality Assurance Plans. After that, the IEEE initiated a systematic program of software engineering standards development. This program was, and still is, managed by a Subcommittee.

The IEEE is the organization that currently has published the most comprehensive set of software engineering standards. Twenty-nine standards have been published as of April, 1996, and 13 additional standards were being developed.

In a recent study, T. Matsubara inventoried 550 standards from 76 organizations, pertinent to the software engineering area. There is a considerable overlap between these standards, either because of work duplication between professional, national, and international organizations or because of domain or organization-specific instantiations of standardization on a given software engineering topic: for example, software development, documentation, and testing policies for Navy Mission Critical Systems.

Interestingly enough, as international standards become available in software engineering, many national and transnational organizations are adopting these standards instead of developing their own. This adoption is driven by two factors:

1. the high costs associated with the development of standards

2. the globalization of the world economy.

Types of software engineering standards

Software engineering standards are focused on the following:

TYPE EXAMPLE PURPOSE

Process life-cycle processes, describe mechanisms and a verification, validation, set of tasks related to the configuration management, engineering of software measurement, CASE tool products selection

Work Products requirements, design focused on deliverables descriptions, documentation generated by a given, or a given set of, software processes or tasks

Methods unit testing, software quality specify a procedure for metrics methodology performing a given task or process

Measurements functional size, software define software engineering process assessment metric used in measuring processes as well as work products

Formalisms CASE tool data interchange, define notations and diagrams, Petri-Net representations that are usually human as well as machine readable

Terminology standard vocabularies define the natural language terms used by practitioners and standards writers

While the above taxonomy represents one way of looking at standards, it illustrates the diversity of types of software engineering standards. Not all software engineering standards fall into a specific category. Some could fall into two or more.

Subcommittee 7

The history of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7

The roots of SC7 go back to ISO/TC97 (Technical Committee 97), established in 1960 for international standardization in the field of information processing.

What is now JTC1/SC7 was put into place as one of the Subcommittees of TC97 (Technical Committee 97) in 1963. Its area of work was Problem definition and analysis and its first project was to address the standardization of flowcharting techniques and representations. From this work, ISO 1028 Flowchart symbols for information processing and ISO 2636 Information processing-Convention for incorporating flowchart symbols in flowcharts became standards, with both being published in 1973.

When JTC1 was established in 1987, ISO/TC97 was combined with IEC/TC83 into a JTC1 Subcommittee as the 7th (SC7). The title SC7 was changed to Software Engineering. SC7 proposed the title Information System Technology, but this title was rejected by JTC1 on the grounds that the title itself could be interpreted extensively, and it might include the entire field in which JTC1 intended to work.

The first SC7 plenary was held in Paris, France in 1987. At the 1996 plenary in Prague, Czechoslovakia, 156 delegates from 17 countries attended.

SC7 organization and program of work

SC7 is presently split into nine active working groups that are mandated to carry on its program of work (see Figure 1.1).

This program of work is a set of standardization projects that are defined by the SC7 Terms of Reference as follows:

Development of guidelines for the management techniques and standardization of supporting methods and tools necessary for the development and testing of software.

These Terms of Reference are being considered for update to:

Standardization of processes, supporting tools and supporting technologies for the engineering of software products and systems.

The key word in these Terms of Reference is process. SC7 is a standardization organization that is focused on processes, specifically the processes required for the engineering of software products and systems. These Terms of Reference translate into the projects shown in Figure 1.2.

A more comprehensive list of the projects that constitute the SC7 Program of Work is given, on a Working Group basis, in Appendix B.

The SPICE Project

The SPICE Project is project 07.29 in the SC7 Program of Work. It is a multi-part document-nine parts-that at the time of printing is going through its first formal review as a Proposed Draft Technical Report (PDTR). The next stages of the standardization process are Draft Technical Report and then publication as a Technical Report.

The project will not end there. Since the SPICE documents will be what are called Technical Reports Type 2-Technical Reports that are published when there is doubt that sufficient consensus can be attained-these documents will have to be reballoted after two years to become full International Standards.

Conclusions

The Program of Work of SC7 has evolved considerably in the past five years. Participation in its meetings has increased, as well as its production of standards. It is expected that more than 30 software engineering standards will be published by SC7 within the next two years.

SC7 has made considerable efforts to ensure its standards and Program of Work meet customer needs. For instance, SC7 and its Working Groups have put into place a comprehensive set of formal liaisons with professional and industrial associations, including:

IEEE Computer Society (WG4)

NATO (WG7)

European Software Institute (WG10)

CDIF (WG11)

International Function Point User Group-IFPUG and European Function Point User Group-EFPUG (WG12).

Members from these organizations can participate as technical experts in the Program of Work of these Working Groups.

As SC7 publishes more standards, their influence on the software engineering profession and industry will increase. Already, standards ISO/IEC 9126 on software product quality characteristics and ISO/IEC 12207 on the software life cycle have made their marks. The SPICE documents will surely contribute greatly to this future influence.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Foreword (Alec Dorling).

Preface.

Acknowledgments.

PART 1.

Chapter 1. Introduction to Software Engineering Standards (Francois Coallier and Motoei Azuma).

Chapter 2. Introduction to SPICE (Jean-Normand Drouin and Harry Barker).

PART 2.

Chapter 3. Introduction to the SPICE Documents and Architecture (Terry P. Rout and Peter G. Simms).

Chapter 4. The Reference Model (Alan W. Graydon, et al.).

chapter 5. Process Assessment Using SPICE: The Assessment Activities (Antonio Coletta).

Chapter 6. Process Assessment Using SPICE: The Rating Framework (Mac Craigmyle).

Chapter 7. The Assessment Model (Carroline Buchman and Helen Thomson).

Chapter 8. Guidelines for Process Improvement (Pascal Jansen and Joc Sanders).

Chapter 9. Guidelines for Determining Supplier Process Capability (John Hamilton).

Chapter 10. Qualification and Training of Assessors (Alan Davies and Alastair Walker).

Chapter 11. A Comparison of ISO 9001 and the SPICE Framework (Victoria A. Hailey).

PART 3.

Chapter 12. Introduction to the SPEICE Trials (Fiona Maclennan, et al.).

Chapter 13. Empirical Evaluation of SPICE (Khaled El Emam and Dennis R. Goldstein).

Chapter 14. Analysis of Assessment Ratings from the Trials (Ian Woodman and Robin Hunter).

Chapter 15. Analysis of Observation and Problem Reports (Peter Marshall, et al.).

Chapter 16. Interrater Agreement in Assessment Ratings (Khaled El Emam and Peter Marshall).

Chapter 17. Using SPICE as a Framework for Software Engineering Education: A Case Study (Val E. Veraart and Sid L. Wright).

Chapter 18. Assessment Using SPICE: A Case Study (Jean-Martin Simon).

Chapter 19. The Future pf the SPICE Trials (Robert Smith).

Appendix A. SEAL of Quality SPICE Assessment Tool.

Appendix B. Strathclyde Process Visualization Tools.

Glossary.

Bibliography.

Index.

Author Biographies.

Editorial Reviews

The SPICE (Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination) Project is a joint effort by the ISO and IEC to create an international standard for software process assessment. This volume covers both the theory of SPICE and its practical applications, including lessons learned from the SPICE trials, and includes two automated tools on CD-ROM to help improve the efficiency of conducting assessments, as well as the full Version 1.00 document set and a program to read and print document files. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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