How mature is your process and how can you make it better?

When developing a software system, every single person or organization must perform the basic steps/stages of software development life cycle. E.g. Requirement Analysis, Requirement specification, Design, Coding... Based on project type, these steps will be followed on any sweet able process model like Waterfall, Iterative, V Model, Spiral, RAD, DSDM, Agile method etc.

Though everyone performing the same high level steps, in root level of these stages, everyone perform in their own way (here the variation happen). For this reason, Performance of process, Quality of product and other software attribute did vary for different person/organization. Like, in Requirement Analysis / Requirement Specification stage, some company collect documents to analyze requirement, some take interview of users and external stakeholders, some do nothing without just talk etc.

Now the question is, the way you are performing these steps, is that good enough for better software? Or if good, how can you make it better (I think in fast growing world, we should not say best)? To improve your process performance, you must measure, where you is now and where you want to go?



To assess your SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) performance, there are some International standards, frameworks. All these are widely used in all over the world and accepted. Some company apply these standards to prove their quality of work, some company apply these models & frameworks to improve their process performances. Whoever applies for what reason, all they get Return On Investment.

List of some SDLC Standards, Frameworks:

Standards:
· ISO 9001:2000 (Quality Model)

· ISO/IEC 12207 (Standard for Software Life Cycle Process)

· IEEE/EIA 12207 (Standard for Information Technology-Software Life Cycle Processes)

Framework:
· CMMi (Capability Maturity Model Integration) by SEI

· ISO/IEC 15504 also known as SPICE (Software Process Improvement and Capability dEtermination)