What is SPiCE 1-2-1?

SPiCE 1-2-1 is the self assessment tool for software development organizations and projects to evaluate and analyze their software development processes according to ISO/IEC IS 15504.

You perform an assessment to determine your strengths and weaknesses concerning your way of developing software.

Use SPiCE 1-2-1 to rate selected processes for software development for a project within one or two days.

The result contains comprehensive evaluations and analysis in the form of charts. If demanded, a report can be generated.

The rating can be done on your own, within a group of your organization (Self-Assessment) or it can be guided using the help of a consultant (Guided Self-Assessment).

You can also perform externally assistet assessments and have the rating done by trained, experienced assessors. Contact us, we'll be happy to advise you about the ideal way how to perform an assessment!

About ISO 15504 and SPiCE:

ISO/IEC IS 15504 is an International Standard to assess software development processes.

At the beginning ISO 15504 was named SPiCE which is just an abbreviation for Software Process Improvement & Capability dEtermination.

The standard contains ten parts. Part 1 to 5 are the normative parts; 6 to 10 are enhancements which extend the useability and adoptability of the process capability concepts to new process areas and new business branches:

The assessment tool SPiCE 1-2-1 covers part 2 fully and part 5 sufficiently for any assessment and education purpose. The other parts of the standard were significantly taken into consideration for the development of the assessment tool. Especially part 7 is fully implemented, so that you can use the tool to calculate your "Organizational Maturity Level".

Well, the whole concept of SPiCE is based upon a reference model with processes having a defined capability dimension. Of course, the development of SPiCE was influenced by the CMM (Capability Maturity Model). Concerning this topic, please have a look at .

So SPiCE has defined the following Capability Dimension:

The underlying concept of SPiCE uses these attributes (PA is just short for Process Attribute) - which form the capability dimension of the model - in the same way for all processes. The advantage is, that once you understood the PAs, you not only can use them for processes part of the reference modell, but also for processes from other process reference modells or especially for your own business processes. This generic charcterization gives you an outline for the journey of process improvement - no matter which sort of proceses you have.

The current version of SPiCE - we call it SPiCE 2012 - contains the following 60 processes whereas 15 of them are so called sub-processes:

These processes are organized in eight process groups AGR, ORG, PRO, ENG, DEV, SUP, REU and QNT. The assignment is just for outlining purpose and has no further influence on the contents.

Just a word concerning the identifier SPiCE 2012: The previous version was called SPiCE IS. IS is the abbreviation for International Standard and represents the versions from 2003-2006. SPiCE IS consists of 48 processes. Upon request, we still have an assessment tool for that version. Before 2003, there was SPiCE TR from 1998 whweras TR means Technical Report. That version had 40 processes.

So far so good. Lots of additional information can be found at the links.