Complementing views in Software Process Improvement - An Assumption Analysis of SPICE from an Organizational Culture Perspective

Abstract: The Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination (SPICE) model is emerging approach for software process improvement (SPI). ISO SPICE is creating standards for handling software processes and trying to improve with the existing approaches. It is well known that SPI models have lower success rates. This is because the models have different organizational cultures within the core assumptions. We assume that SPICE has an almost similar structure to CMM, and therefore, it will have lower rate of success in the future. So we believe that SPICE can also benefit from having complete understanding of the organization cultures. Further, CMM model contained many organizational cultures in the core assumption which are creating problems for successful implementation. The SPICE model is also known as ISO 15504, used worldwide as a standard framework for the process implementation and assessment. In this research, we analyze the SPICE model and identify organizational cultures that exist within it and suggest what type of organizations will benefit from it. This might be helpful to future researchers trying to implement SPI model that supports all the organizational cultural types.