ISO/IEC 15504 - Acceptance of ISO/IEC 15504

Acceptance of ISO/IEC 15504

ISO/IEC 15504 has been successful as:

• ISO/IEC 15504 is publicly available through National Standards Bodies.
• It has the support of the international community.
• Over 4000 assessments have been performed to date.
• Major sectors are leading the pace such as automotive, space and medical systems with industry relevant variants.
• Domain-specific models like Automotive SPICE and SPICE 4 SPACE can be derived from it.
• There have been many international initiatives to support take-up such as SPICE for small companies.

On the other hand, ISO/IEC 15504 has not yet been as successful as the CMMI. This has been for several reasons:

• ISO/IEC 15504 is not available as free download but must be purchased from the ISO (Automotive SPICE on the other hand can be freely downloaded from the link supplied below.) CMM and CMMI are available as free downloads from the SEI website.
• The CMMI is actively sponsored (by the US Department of Defense).
• The CMM was created first, and reached critical 'market' share before ISO 15504 became available.
• The CMM has subsequently been replaced by the CMMI, which incorporates many of the ideas of ISO/IEC 15504, but also retains the benefits of the CMM.

Like the CMM, ISO/IEC 15504 was created in a development context, making it difficult to apply in a service management context. But work has started to develop a ISO/IEC 20000-based process reference model (ISO/IEC 20000-4) that can serve as a basis for a process assessment model. This is planned to become part 8 to the standard (ISO/IEC 15504-8). In addition there are methods available that adapt its use to various contexts.