The Incremental Commitment Spiral Model: Principles and Practices for Successful Systems and Software

“The title makes a huge promise: a way to divide commitment into increments that are both meetable (good news for developers) and meaningful (good news for managers and stakeholders). And the book makes good on that promise.”

–Tom DeMarco, Principal, The Atlantic Systems Guild, author of Peopleware, Deadline, and Slack

 

“I am seriously impressed with this ICSM book. Besides being conceptually sound, I was amazed by the sheer number of clear and concise characterizations of issues, relationships, and solutions. I wanted to take a yellow highlighter to it until I realized I’d be highlighting most of the book.”

–Curt Hibbs, Chief Agile Evangelist, Boeing

 

Use the ICSM to Generate and Evolve Your Life-Cycle Process Assets to Best Fit Your Organization’s Diverse and Changing Needs

 

Many systems development practitioners find traditional “one-size-fits-all” processes inadequate for the growing complexity, diversity, dynamism, and assurance needs of their products and services. The Incremental Commitment Spiral Model (ICSM) responds with a principle- and risk-based framework for defining and evolving your project and corporate process assets, avoiding pitfalls and disruption, and leveraging opportunities to increase value.

 

This book explains ICSM’s framework of decision criteria and principles, and shows how to apply them through relevant examples. It demonstrates ICSM’s potential for reducing rework and technical debt, improving maintainability, handling emergent requirements, and raising assurance levels.

 

Its coverage includes

• What makes a system development successful
• ICSM’s goals, principles, and usage as a process-generation framework
• Creating and evolving processes to match your risks and opportunities
• Integrating your current practices and adopting ICSM concepts incrementally, focusing on your greatest needs and opportunities

 

About the Website: Download the evolving ICSM guidelines, subprocesses, templates, tools, white papers, and academic support resources at csse.usc.edu/ICSM.

 

Barry Boehm developed a conceptual version of the spiral model at TRW in 1978, but only in 1981 was he able to employ it in successfully, leading the development of a corporate TRW software development environment. SInce the formal publication of this model in 1988, he and his colleagues have devoted extensive efforts to clarifying and evolving it through several intermediate versions into the ICSM. He is the USC Distinguished Professor of Computer Sciences, Industrial and Systems Engineering, and Astronautics; the TRW Professor of Software Engineering; the Chief Scientist of the DoD-Stevens-USC Systems Engineering Research Center, and the founding Director of the USC Center for Systems and Software Engineering. He was director of DARPA-ISTO for 1989-92, at TRW for 1973-89, at Rand Corporation for 1959—73, and at General Dynamics for 1955-59. He is a Fellow of the primary professional societies in computing (ACM), aerospace (AIAA), electronics (IEEE), systems engineering (INCOSE), and lean and agile development (LSS), and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.

 

Jo Ann Lane is currently the systems engineering Co-Director of the University of Southern California Center for Systems and Software Engineering, a member of the Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC) Research Council representing the system of systems research area, and emeritus professor of computer science at San Diego State University.  Her current areas of research include system of systems engineering, system affordability, expediting systems engineering, balancing lean and agile techniques with technical debt, and innovation in systems engineering. Previous publications include over 50 journal articles and conference papers.  In addition, she was co-author of the 2008 Department of Defense Systems Engineering Guide for Systems of Systems and a contributor to the Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge (SEBoK).  Prior to her current work in academia, she was a Vice President in SAIC’s Healthcare and Software and Systems Integration groups.

 

Supannika Koolmanojwong is a faculty member and a researcher at the University of Southern California Center for Systems and Software Engineering. Her primary research areas are systems and software process modeling, software process improvement, software process quality assurance, software metrics and measurement, agile and lean software development and expediting systems engineering. She is a certified ScrumMaster and a certified Product Owner. Prior to joining USC, Dr. Koolmanojwong was a software engineer and a RUP/OpenUp Content Developer at IBM RationalSoftware Group.

 

Dr. Richard Turner has more than 30 years of experience in systems, software, and acquisition engineering. He is currently a Distinguished Service Professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, and a Principle Investigator with the Systems Engineering Research Center. Although on the author team for CMMI, Dr. Turner is now active in the agile, lean, and kanban communities. He is currently studying agility and lean approaches as a means to solve large-systems issues. Dr. Turner is a member of the Executive Committee of the NDIA/AFEI Agile for Defense Adoption Proponent Team, the INCOSE Agile SE Working Group, and was an author of the groundbreaking IEEE Computer Society/PMI Software Extension for the Guide to the PMBOK that spans the gap between traditional and agile approaches. He is a Fellow of the Lean Systems Society, a Golden Core awardee of the IEEE Computer Society, and co-author of three other books: Balancing Agility and Discipline: A Guide for the Perplexed, co-written with Barry Boehm, CMMI Survival Guide: Just Enough Process Improvement, coauthored with Suzanne Garcia, and CMMI Distilled.