Process Standards

Process Standards

You have two friends. Sonya is extremely well organized, she keeps lists of things to do, she always knows where to find a tool or who has a particular book, and everything is done before it is needed. Dorrie, on the other hand, is a mess. She can never find her algebra book, her desk has so many piles of papers you cannot see the top, and she seems to deal with everything as a crisis because she tends to ignore things until the last minute. Who would you choose to organize and run a major social function, a new product launch, or a multiple-author paper? Most people would pick Sonya, concluding that her organization skills are crucial. There is no guarantee that Sonya would do a better job than Dorrie, but you might assume the chances are better with Sonya.

We know that software development is difficult in part because it has inherently human aspects that are very difficult to judge in advance. Still, we may conclude that software built in an orderly manner has a better chance of being good or secure.

The Software Engineering Institute developed the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) to assess organizations, not products (see [HUM88] and [PAU93]). The International Standards Organization (ISO) developed process standard ISO 9001 [ISO94] , which is somewhat similar to the CMM (see [PAU95] ). Finally the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) developed the System Security Engineering CMM (SSE CMM, see [NSA95a]). All of these are process models, in that they examine how an organization does something, not what it does. Thus, they judge consistency, and many people extend consistency to quality. For views on that subject, see Bollinger and McGowan [BOL91] and Curtis [CUR87]. El Emam [ELE95] has also looked at the reliability of measuring a process.

Now go back to the original descriptions of Sonya and Dorrie. Who would make the better developer? That question is tricky because many of us have friends like Dorrie who are fabulous programmers, but we may also know great programmers who resemble Sonya. And some successful teams have both. Order, structure, and consistency may lead to good software projects, but it is not sure to be the only way to go.