3 Chapter 1 Learning SPI in Practice

According to the common rhetoric of software process improvement (SPI), there are a few basic steps to improving your software development process. First, you assess your organization’s current capability to develop quality software. Based on this, you derive a stepwise, focused strategy for improving this capability. You then make im-provement efforts an integral part of your organization’s long-term goals. The result? Both the quality of your services and the productivity of your processes increase. SPI rhetoric is certainly powerful and appealing, and it inspires many software organizations to engage in improvement initiatives. However, even though most or-ganizations struggle to meet expectations, many of them eventually fail. Starting SPI is not difficult. You begin by assessing your current processes. Typi-cally, enthusiasm at this point is high. Most of your colleagues will be eager to learn about the strengths and weaknesses in the way projects are organized and carried out. However, turning assessment insights into action is the point at which many or-ganizations fail. Others manage to initiate focused improvement projects, only to find that implementing new ideas is very difficult (see Chapter 15). Even when you suc-ceed in implementing an idea in an individual project, you are still a long way from institutionalizing improvements. In addition to the predictable challenges at each stage, you’re likely to encounter other challenges. These include conflicts between SPI efforts and other traditional improvement initiatives, and the tendency for re-sources to grow scarce as the first wave of energy for SPI dies out. Clearly, SPI success involves more than simply choosing the right methods and collaborating with the best experts (see Chapter 16). The authors of this book have all been actively engaged in SPI research and prac-tice for several years. Our experiences have taught us what it takes to go from SPI rhetoric to success with actual initiatives. In some ways, SPI’s main goal works against success: SPI seeks to change existing practices. In this change process, deepl