Prescription, description, reflection: the shape of the software process improvement field

This article reviews 322 representative contributions to the software process improvement (SPI) literature. The contributions are categorised according to a simple framework: whether their primary goal is prescriptive (to tell SPI professionals what to do), descriptive (to report actual instances of SPI programs in software organisations), or reflective (theoretically analytical). The field is found to be rather dominated by one approach (the capability maturity model (CMM)) and heavily biased towards prescriptive contributions. Neither of these trends is necessarily beneficial, and it is argued that more theoretically reflective contributions could encourage a diversity of approaches which might also benefit practitioners. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.