In this article, we describe the results of CMMI software process appraisal work with six smallto medium-sized software development companies. Our analysis of six CMMI process areas appraised within each of these organisations is presented. Commonly practiced or not practiced elements of the model are identified, leading to the notion of perceived value associated with each specific CMMI practice. A finer-grained framework, which encompasses the notion of perceived value within specific practices, is presented. We argue that such a framework provides incentive to small-to medium-sized enterprises starting process improvement programmes.

This paper describes a software process improvement (SPI) framework to ensure regulatory compliance for the software developed in medical devices. The software framework introduced here (known as MedeSPI-Medical Devices Software Process Improvement) will address an opportunity to integrate the regulatory issues and process improvement mechanisms in order to achieve improved software processes.

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Abstract. In this paper we firstly describe the appraisal method that was developed by the Centre for Software Process Technologies (CSPT) to assess software processes within small to medium sized (SMEs) organisations that have little or no experience of software process improvement programmes. We then discuss our experience of developing and using our appraisal method within six SMEs organisations within Northern Ireland. Next we compare our assessment method with existing lightweight assessment methods that have also been used to assess software processes within SMEs software development organisations. We then describe new features that we are currently introducing to improve our software process appraisal method.

In this article we show how the results from software process appraisals of ten small‐ to medium‐sized software development enterprises demonstrate that as companies become larger they naturally use an increasing number of practices within the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI®). The companies involved in this study had no CMMI® experience prior to this work. We identify those practices that tend to be best followed by both small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises and those that tend to be introduced as the company size increases from small to medium. We conclude that the CMMI® appears to have an inherent roadmap for process improvement, buried within its explicit structure of capability levels that is driven by company expansion. The results of this study can be used by organisations to plan process improvement as they expand in size and staff complement. We further show how our results are consistent with the European Union's definition of a ‘Small’ and a ‘Medium’ sized enterprise. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.