The SPICE Project (Software Process Improvement and Capability dEtermination) is an international collaborative effort to support the development of a new international standard for software process assessment. The project was established by the international committee on software engineering standards, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7 in January 1993. This followed the recommendations of the committee's Study Group on the Needs and Requirements for a standard for software process assessment. The SPICE Project, when established, had three defined goals:

1. Assist the standardization project in its preparatory stage to develop initial working drafts.

2. Undertake user trials in order to gain early experience data that will form a basis for revision of the published technical reports prior to review as full international standards.

3. Create market awareness and takeup of the evolving standards.

ISO/IEC TR 15504 consists of nine parts. The parts of the document set, and their relationships, are shown. Two of the components—parts 2 and 3—are the only normative elements, and contain all of the requirements for process assessment. All other parts contain guidance of one form or another.

The reference model defined in ISO 15504-2 is described as a “two dimensional model of processes and process capability.” It provides a common scale for the expression of the results of process assessment. Each process is defined through a detailed statement of the purpose of the process, together with a list of the expected outcomes of executing the process. An assessment model is a process model designed to support the conduct of process assessment. The assessment model plays a vital role in the conduct of an assessment. It supports the judgment of the assessor in rating process capability, by providing a means for collating the evidence collected during the assessment. The goal of the assessment is to relate the capability of the assessed process to the measurement scheme of the reference model. The assessment model provides indicators related to the reference model; the evidence from the assessed process can be related to these indicators. Result of process assessement use are given.