I attended the SEI webinar last night on the impending update on SCAMPI v1.3 due to be released in November, I have summarised the major points.

3 following themes were discussed:

  • scoping the organisational unit
  • sampling the organisational unit
  • sufficiency of data sources

Scoping the organisational unit

This will change to allow better coverage of non project work i.e. for functions and also to allow easier mapping to the way work is performed in service organisations. Scoping will be based around a ‘basic unit’ concept. These basic units may be functions (like QA or CM groups or SEPGs), projects or service teams.

Sampling the organisational unit

This is the biggest change!

The SEI will introduce a formula for defining the number of basic units from a sub group that will be sampled for a SCAMPI. A number of categories will need to be defined and be used as sampling factors. Size parameters will be defined and this along with the sampling factors will be used to calculate the number of basic units from the sub group. They have created a spreadsheet for this and this will also be made available. The MDD will be updated to reflect this. The objective is to provide a better mechanism for obtaining the best sample for an organisational unit.

Sufficiency of data sources

The debate between Direct and Indirect artifacts has been settled. They will only be called artifacts. SCAMPIs will only need to focus on artifacts that demonstrate the meeting of the practice. Should be less worry for data collectors, but more need to understand the artifact and the practice.

Affirmations – more importance will be given to the understanding of the practice that the artifact represents than just quoting the buzz word i.e. ‘we used the estimation sheet which contained size, complexity assumptions etc’ rather than, ‘we used an estimation sheet!’.

More focus will be given to the data collection plan, which may require a separate document as part of the appraisal package that gets submitted to the SEI.

Further changes are in the pipeline – instead of Verification or Discovery based appraisal, there will only be ‘Managed Discovery’ allowing for new data to be collected during the SCAMPI process.

More use of virtual teams and virtual technologies

Multiple constellations – single appraisal covering multi models (my favourite as most of our clients work this way).

I would urge anyone to join the next webinars on this subject to stay abreast of the changes that are planned, early warnings are better than late surprises.

I will post further updates as I know them.

To join the webinars, http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/webinars.cfm