Software Process Improvement in CMS—Are we Different？

One of the most challenging issues faced in HEP in recent years is the question of how to capitalise on software development and maintenance experience in a continuous manner.To capitalise inour context means to evaluate and apply new technologies as they arise,and to further evolve technologies arlready widely in use,It also implies the definition and adoption of standards,while ensuring reproducibility and quality of results.The CMS process improvement effort is two-pronged.It aims at continuous improve ment of the ways we do Object Oriented software,as well as continuous improvement in the efficiency of the working enviuronment.In particular the use and creation of de-facto software process standards within CMS has proven to be key to our successful software process improvement program.We describe the successful CMS implementation of a software process improvement strategy,following ISO 15504 since three years.We give the current status of the most important processes families formally established in CMS,and provide the guidelines we followed both for tool development,and methodology establishment.