Applying benchmarking to learn from best practices

Assessments are a proven and widely used method to measure one's software process strengths and weaknesses. This helps determine where to start software process improvement programs. However, an assessment uses information internal to an organisation, but does not compare its processes to a competitor's. Benchmarking is a way to compare one's practices with other organisations. These types of comparisons reflect what are currently best practices within industry. In combination with, assessment results, benchmarking can be used as a useful indicator on which processes to improve based upon industry assessment data. In this paper we present initial benchmarking results using data from the SPICE (Software Process Improvement and Capability dEtermination) Trials. To obtain the results, we applied an analysis technique called OSR (Optimised Set Reduction). This technique is well suited to find patterns in a database and derive interpretable models. We describe the type of benchmarks that are going to be produced for the SPICE Trails participants and how they can used for process improvement. Lastly, we describe how to integrate benchmarking into an assessment method.