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Referring physicians prefer local interpretation of radiologic images to international interpretation when all things are equal. However, the timeliness of image interpretation and the cost to the patient are important factors in this decision.

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.

This article describes a low‐overhead method of software process appraisal that has been developed and used by the Centre for Software Process Technologies (CSPT) to appraise small‐to‐medium sized software development organisations in Northern Ireland (NI) that have little or no experience of software process improvement programmes.During the appraisal, information is collected and reviewed to produce a findings report. The findings report consists of a list of strengths, issues and suggested actions for each of the process areas evaluated. The suggested actions detail how the assessed company may improve their processes in line with their business goals. Because the NI software industry is mainly composed of small‐to‐medium sized software development companies, it is sometimes difficult, both in terms of financial expense and time, for such companies to engage in regular appraisals with the CSPT appraisal team. Therefore, since the main purpose of the CSPT is to instil a software process improvement culture into the NI software industry, a pragmatic and relatively non‐evasive solution has been developed.This solution has two parts. The first part enables an initial software process appraisal to be performed on‐site by the CSPT appraisal team. The second part is an on‐line appraisal tool used by the company itself during the follow‐on periodic self‐appraisals. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.