An Empirical Evaluation of the Prospective International SPICE Standard

The SPICE project aims to deliver an international standard on software process assessment. Unique among software engineering standards efforts, there is an empirical trials activity as part of the SPICE project. The first phase of these trials was completed in calendar year 1995. During phase 1 data was collected to evaluate design decisions of the SPICE framework and the usability of the core SPICE documents. Part of this data was collected using questionnaires. The respondents were both assessors and assessees. In this paper we present an analysis of the responses to these questionnaires based on 35 assessments conducted during phase 1 of the SPICE trials. The results indicate that the SPICE framework is in general sound, but they also highlight some potential weaknessesn. Recommendations to the SPICE project based on these results are presented.