Originally, the DoD and the SEI divided their software assessment efforts between two kinds of appraisals. The first was the software process assessment (SPA) method, to be used by organizations to gain insight into their own software development capability and to prioritize actions for process improvement. The second was the software capability evaluation (SCE) method, to be used in outside evaluations of the software process of an organization competing for a DoD contract.
Note: The SEI uses "appraisal" as an umbrella term that refers both to "assessments" and audit-like "evaluations."
Evaluations such as the SEI Software Capability Evaluation (SCE) constitute investigations of an organization conducted by an outside business entity. SCEs are often conducted as part of a Department of Defense or other government or commercial software acquisition process and are used to help evaluate the level of a particular contractor’s process maturity.
SCEs are also commonly conducted as part of the monitoring of an acquisition after a contract has been awarded or as input for an incentive/award fee decision .
The subsequent development of these methods, as this article argues, suggested that the second of them would prove to be burdened with many of the problems of previous audits, whereas the first would emerge as a superior alternative. But to understand why, it is necessary to understand the differences between them. SPAs and SCEs "differ in many respects, including motivation for the method, objective, ownership of results, and outcome" . But the basic difference is that the SPA collaborative approach encourages an atmosphere to promote ongoing process improvement. Therefore, whereas SCE evaluations continued to be necessary for the purposes of acquisition decisions, the SPA method acquired greater and greater importance in SEI-sponsored process improvement efforts.