Maturity Alone Is Meaningless: SPI Reality from Industry

by Erik Rodenbach, Frank van Latum,and Rini van Solingen

The Tokheim development center in Bladel, the Netherlands, has 10 years of experience in applying software process improvement (SPI) methods. The organization has used several methods to improve and adapt the software development process and regularly recorded successes during those years. In 1992, the Bladel site achieved ISO 9001 certification and Level 2 of the Software Engineering Institute's (SEI) Capability Maturity Model (CMM). Now, several years later, the software development center is still ISO 9001/TickIT certified; however, two recent BOOTSTRAP assessments pointed out that several subprocesses of the software development process can be rated in the lowest capability ranges. We believe the reason for this is that the SPI program has been heavily influenced by several factors not clearly identified in most methods, and that "success" is context specific and not driven by "maturity." In this article, we present an overview of the SPI methods applied in the Tokheim organization and discuss how the progress of the SPI program has been influenced by these "outside" factors.

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Maturity Alone Is Meaningless: SPI Reality from Industry October 2001