32 IEEE SOFTWARE Published by the IEEE Computer Society 0740-7459/04/$20.00 © 2004 IEEE defined engineering process is more likely to produce products that consistently meet the purchaser’s requirements within schedule and budget than a poorly managed organization with no such engineering process. A sound process is, however, merely one prerequisite: it doesn’t guarantee good products. With the amount of attention, literature, and invest- ments focusing on SPI, the question regularly pops up whether these investments are worth their cost. 2,3 Surprisingly, we find only a lim- ited number of industrial SPI publications that contain cost-benefit numbers and that measure ROI (see the “ROI Numbers for SPI” sidebar). Analyzing SPI’s ROI is relevant for ■ Convincing managers to invest money and effort in improvement, and convincing them that SPI can help solve structural problems. ■ Estimating how much effort to invest to solve a certain problem or estimating whether a certain intended benefit is worth its cost. ■ Deciding which process improvement to implement first. Many organizations must prioritize due to timing and resource con- straints. ■ Continuing improvement programs. SPI bud- gets are assigned and discussed yearly, so benefits must be explicit and organiza- tions must show sufficient ROI, or contin- uation is at risk. focus Measuring the ROI of Software Process Improvement S oftware process improvement has been on the agenda of both ac- ademics and practitioners, with the Capability Maturity Model 1 as its de facto method. Many companies have invested large sums of money in improving their software processes, and several re- search papers document SPI’s effectiveness. SPI aims to create more effective and efficient software development and maintenance by structuring and op- timizing processes. SPI assumes that a well-managed organization with a return on investment Software practitioners often say that they can’t accurately calculate return on investment because they can’t quantify software process improvement’s benefits. On the contrary, we can measure benefits just as easily as we measure cost. Rini van Solingen, LogicaCMG