ISO/IEC 15504 - History

History

A working group was formed in 1993 to draft the international standard and used the acronym, SPICE. SPICE initially stood for "Software Process Improvement and Capability Evaluation", but in consideration of French concerns over the meaning of "evaluation", SPICE has now been redefined as "Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination". SPICE is still used for the user group of the standard, and the title for the annual conference. The first SPICE was held in Limerick, Ireland in 2000, "SPICE 2003" was hosted by ESA in the Netherlands, "SPICE 2004" was hosted in Portugal, "SPICE 2005" in Austria, "SPICE 2006" in Luxembourg, "SPICE 2007" in South Korea, "SPICE 2008" in Nuremberg, Germany and SPICE 2009 in Helsinki, Finland.

The first versions of the standard focused exclusively on software development processes. This was expanded to cover all related processes in a software business, for example, project management, configuration management, quality assurance, and so on. The list of processes covered, grew to cover six business areas:

• organizational
• management
• engineering
• acquisition supply
• support
• operations.

In a major revision to the draft standard in 2004, the process reference model was removed and is now related to the ISO/IEC 12207 (Software Lifecycle Processes). The issued standard now specifies the measurement framework and can use different process reference models. There are five general and industry models in use.

Part 5 specifies software process assessment and part 6 specifies system process assessment.

The latest work in the ISO standards working group includes creation of a maturity model, which is planned to become ISO/IEC 15504 part 7.