ISO/IEC15504-Process Assessment Standard : A Reference Book (The Kluwer International Series in Engineering and Computer Science)

Rating:
Summary: Excellent for quality professionals, especially assessors
Review: This is a technical reference book of the ISO/IEC 15504 standard for process assessment. The author provides lots of guidance based upon his personal experience on the standard and clarifies several aspects that are not always clear to the new process assessors and organizations starting to perform assessments. He provides a reader guide at the start to direct readers of varying experience and roles to what may interest them most.

The author poses some rhetorical questions about standards in general and process assessment standards in particular. He then starts to discuss process models in an easy to read way, with lots of diagrams illustrating his text. The author eases into the requirements for process assessment so that reader unfamiliar with the standard are gradually introduced to increased detail as needed. The author then explains the capability dimension, and how to interpret it with lots of good reference and comparison to the standard. He uses a neat analogy of a home to illustrate the increasing utility of the capability dimension measurement scale.

Readers are then taken through a variety of well-illustrated process assessment models and process lifecycle models. The author covers lots of existing standards that are related to ISO/IEC 15504, including software lifecycles, ITIL, SEI CMMI and FAA iCMM.

Although this is a technical reference book, it contains enough generally useful information to be readable for anyone interested in or involved in organizations that are planning or using process assessment to improve their business. See also my review of the companion Practical Guide, which describes the uses of results of assessments. A good technical reference book with some solid and readable advice for less technical readers. I recommend this book for quality professionals, especially assessors, but also anyone deciding upon the way they want to assess their business.