Software Process Improvement (SPI) Initiative

The NASA Software Engineering Initiative Implementation Plan levies two requirements on each NASA Center that produces software. These requirements are: 1) to develop and implement a plan to advance software engineering capabilities for the Center's organizations, and 2) to show ongoing progress toward software process and product improvement goals in the Center plan and against a Center-selected model for process improvement.

The NASA initiative strives to achieve the following through advancing software engineering practices:

• Improved cost and schedule predictability
• Improved software reliability
• Improved software quality and
• Reduced software cost

At Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), the response to the NASA initiative is the Software Development Process Improvement Plan. This plan, which was developed by the GSFC Software Process Improvement (SPI) Project in 2001 and revised in 2004, identifies the Center goals and strategies to be met in addition to those defined at the Agency level. The GSFC process improvement effort focuses on improving the processes and products at GSFC, using Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) as the measure of progress. Specifically, the SPI goals are to:

• Increase percentage of on-time, within cost software development projects by at least 10%
• Increase productivity by at least 5%
• Decrease cycle time by 10-20%
• Reduce error rate after delivery by at least 20%

These goals are to be achieved over the lifetime of the GSFC plan, which will include several iterations of defining, deploying, assessing, and improving software development processes. The first improvement cycle is currently focusing on documentation of existing best practices and creation of a measurement baseline against which sustained organizational improvement can be demonstrated with respect to the above goals.

This website provides access to the products of this improvement initiative, including process assets, tools, training, and measurement information. The site is updated frequently to reflect the continuing improvements being made at GSFC, so visit the site often and take advantage of its wealth of information.