SPICE – ISO/IEC 15504

The ISO/IEC 15504 standard, also called SPICE, Software Process Improvement and Capability Etermination, after the project that gave rise to the standard, provides a basis for carrying out evaluations of the capacity of software processes and allows the results obtained to be reflected on a common scale, which can be used:

• To check the evolution of an organization over time or to observe its situation compared to the competition.
• For the definition of improvement strategies.

The ISO 15504 standard is an evaluation standard used by companies to evaluate their quality system with respect to the processes relevant to the company in product development, such as software production processes, operations management, product maintenance or technical support.

In this way, it allows the organization that uses this evaluation standard to identify a level of compliance with quality out of a total of 5 levels. Furthermore, the ISO 15504 standard is a standard for continuous improvement, since once identified the level of the company, guidelines are provided to achieve the next level.

SPICE Features

The ISO 15504 standard is characterized by:

• Be applicable to any organization or company.
• Be independent of the organization, life cycle model, methodology and technology.
• Be a framework for evaluation methods, not a method or model itself.
• Cover different objectives for process evaluation:
  – Determination of capacity (capacity or maturity levels).
  – Process improvement.
  – Evaluate compliance with certain two requirements of the development life cycle software development.

Advantages of ISO/IEC 15504

• Specific standard for software development and maintenance.
• Oriented to improve processes to contribute to business objectives.
• Defined as a set of processes.
• Easy to understand.

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