Is ISO/IEC 15504 applicable to agile methods?

Abstract

In the last two decades several models for evaluating software process capability have been defined and became more and more popular. The application of such models, and in particular the ISO/IEC 15504, determined a general software process improvement in many domains. Nevertheless, the application of the ISO/IEC 15504 standard is still considered by many agile developers as incompatible with agile approaches. Such an attitude is mainly based on common misunderstandings on what the ISO/IEC 15504 is and on what its application involves. This paper aims at showing that this standard, if genuinely applied, can be effectively used also in agile contexts. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.