Software Engineering Institute

✍ Scribed by Lawrence G. Jones; Linda M. Northrop; James D. Hart

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 384 KB
• Volume: 2
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1077-4866
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-1670(199606)2:2<149::aid-spip44>3.0.co;2-w

✦ Synopsis

News

This is the fifth in a series of articles on the IDEALSm' model for continuous process improvement. Previous articles gave an overview of the model and provided details on the first three phases of IDEAL. One future article will address the Leveraging phase, recently renamed by SEI as the Learning phase. This article focuses on the key activities, tasks, benefits, and issues associated with performing the Acting phase of the model.

While the Establishing phase establishes software process improvement (SPI) contracts2 for improvement, the Acting phase is the fulfillment of those contracts. The benefit to performing the Acting phase is clear. An organization receives very little return on its SPI investments unless it performs this phase. SPI success or failure is in the actions the organization takes to improve, and these actions are primarily in the Acting phase.