Preliminary Report on Conducting SEI-Assisted Assessments of Software Engineering

Characterizing the state of software engineering practice within an organization is a necessary prerequisite to orderly, meaningful, and sustainable improvement of the organizations ability to produce or support cost-effective, high quality software products. The Software Engineering Institute is developing a methodology for conducting SEI-assisted assessments of software engineering capability. The assessment methodology has five phases: 1. selecting the candidate organization, 2. preparing for the assessment, 3. conducting the assessment, 4. communicating final assessment findings and action recommendations, and 5. post-assessment follow-up activities. This report describes the methodology in detail.