ESPITI

ESPITI is a European wide training initiative, sponsored by the European Commission with 8,5 MECU through the European Software and Systems Initiative (E S S I). Through training it aims to raise awareness of the advantages of quality management and assurance, software process improvement and the ISO 9000 standard. The project also wants to encourage co-operation between organisations throughout Europe to share knowledge and experience. It is intended to benefit software businesses in all sectors of the economy, placing special emphasis on the needs of small-to-medium sized enterprises.

Seventeen European countries participate in ESPITI. Finland, Sweden, Norway and Iceland co-operate within a part of the project called SSPIT (Scandinavian Software Process Improvement Training). Swedish Institute for Systems Development (SISU) manages ESPITI/SSPIT in Sweden. The work includes arranging about 50 training days in the area of software process measurement and improvement.

The ESPITI project started with a user survey in the European software industry. The purpose was to identify the usage and knowledge of methods for process measurement and improvement. In Sweden the questionnaire was sent to 692 software developing companies of different sizes and 244 answers were recieved. The results of the survey are used as a base for planning the ESPITI training program in each country.

The areas covered by the ESPITI training program in Sweden are software process management, software metrics, time and cost estimation, requirements engineering, the assessment and improvement methods CMM (Capability Maturity Model), BOOTSTRAP, PRODEVO, SPICE (Software Process Improvement and Capability dEtermination) and the standard ISO 9000. SISU also arranges two series of seminars for experience exchange (competence networks) in the area of process measurement and requirements engineering respectively.