This article is premised on the fact that the most effective and sophisticated evaluation of an organization’s capability to produce quality software is a process improvement assessment such as an SEI CBA IPI or (staged) SCAMPI. An alternative is one of the several methods (including the continuous version of SCAMPI) that look primarily at individual process areas rather than the capability of the entire organization. However, as Process Improvement Methodologies and Assessment Methods has already argued, those alternatives fall outside the primary focus of this article.
Most of the information provided by what follows is applicable either for a CBA IPI or (staged) SCAMPI. There may, however, be reasons to choose one or the other depending on business requirements. As presently constituted, the CBA IPI method guarantees that the assessment will use the full power of interviews to ascertain and improve practices, whereas the SCAMPI method requires extra care to ensure the same. On the other hand, SCAMPI, which at present remains the primary focus of SEI activities, has been designed to cover not only the software but also the system elements of the development process.
An assessment commits an organization to the following objectives reflected in the assessment plan:
To provide an accurate picture of the organization’s current process strengths and weaknesses, consistent with a reference model (CMM or CMMI), and to identify key areas for improvement that provide a prioritized approach to process improvement as it relates to the business context.
To identify any major non-model issues that impact the process improvement effort.
To provide a set of appropriately detailed assessment findings to the organization sufficient to develop process improvement plans.
To provide the organization with data needed to "baseline" an understanding of the organization’s current capability and to track improvements over time.
To support, enable, and encourage an organization’s commitment to process improvement .