Southern Polytechnic State University
Colloquium Series
Computer Science and Software Engineering
Room H 320
Dr. Jorge L. Diaz-Herrera
Head, Department of Computer Science
Southern Polytechnic State University
Software Process Improvement
Abstract
The Capability Maturity Model for Software (Sw-CMMÓ ), developed by the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and the ISO 9000 series of standards, developed by the International Standards Organization, have a common challenge for improving and certifying quality and process management for software. The Sw-CMM is both a reference model for appraising process maturity and a normative model for process improvement. The ISO 9001 is a "model for quality assurance in design/development, production, installation, and servicing," and as such it is the standard that is applicable to software development activities. The CMM spawned a proliferation of process assessment methods applied to products of national standard. This led the UK Ministry of Defense to propose and international standard for process assessment. The new standard ISO/IEC 1554, nicknamed SPICE (Software Process Improvement and Capability dEtermination), is intended to harmonize and extend the existing approaches.
The purpose of this talk is to contrast the Sw-CMM and the ISO 9001-3 and to introduce the fundamentals of SPICE. Although there is commonlity between the ISO standard and the Sw-CMM, there are also differences. For example, an ISO 9001-compliant organization would not necessarily satisfy all of the Sw-CMM level 2 key process areas, it would satisfy most of the level 2 goals and many of the level 3 goals. Conversely, it is possible for a Sw-CMM level 1 organization to receive ISO 9001 registration; there are also areas addressed by ISO 9001 that are not in the Sw-CMM. We conclude with presenting the basic design of SPICE together with a brief description of its main components and how it relates to both ISO-9001-3 and the Sw-CMM.
About the Speaker
Dr. Diaz-Herrera is Professor of Computer Science and Department Head at Southern Polytechnic State University in Marietta, Georgia. Prior to this position he was Chair of the Software Engineering Department at Monmouth University in New Jersey. He spent four and half years as a senior member of the technical staff at the Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University teaching in CMU’s Master of Software Engineering, and conducting research in the Product Line Engineering program. He was in the faculty of the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University, in Fairfax Virginia, and in the Computer Science faculty at SUNY-Binghamton, N.Y. before that. He has conducted extensive consulting services with a number of firms and government agencies. Dr. Diaz-Herrera has chaired several national and international conferences, and has kept active participation with the ACM and IEEE-CS communities. He is the founder and current chair of the ACM SIGAda AI Working Group; he has been a technical reviewer for the National Science Foundation and the American Society for Engineering Education, an ACM National Lecturer for four consecutive years, and an invited speaker in numerous occasions giving many short courses and tutorials both in the US and abroad. He has more than 50 publications. Dr. Diaz-Herrera completed a Systems Analysis degree in 1974 in Venezuela, and both a Master and a Ph.D. degree in computer studies from the University of Lancaster in England in 1977 and 1981 respectively. He has been a member of the British Computer Society since 1977, ACM since 1978, IEEE since 1983, and of the American Society for Engineering Education since 1989.
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