Appraisal Submittal Packet
Version 2.0
April 1999
General Instructions
Special
Thanks
We would like to take this opportunity to thank those individuals who have sent appraisal
results to the SEI for their continuing cooperation and support of our data collection
efforts. To aid in these collection efforts we have improved the following forms and
questionnaires.
Enclosures
Enclosed you will find:
I
Process Appraisal Information System (PAIS)
Record Of Entry Form - Version 2.0
II
Organization Questionnaire (OQ) - Version 2.0
III
Project Questionnaire (PQ) - Version 2.0
IV
Confidentiality Letter
V
SEI Nondisclosure Agreement
When submitting results from a CBA IPI, SPA, Interim Profile or any other CMM® for
Software based appraisal, please fill out the PAIS - Record of Entry Form. Enclose the
PAIS Form with the appraisal result artifacts and send the material to:
PAIS
Software Engineering Institute
4500 Fifth Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
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OQ, PQ and
PAIS Form
The Organization and Project Questionnaires were designed with two purposes in mind:
•
To assist you in pre-onsite activities, such as:
Identifying software groups/projects within an organization (OQ)
Identifying which group/projects to appraise (PQ)
•
For collecting data many customers like you have informed us they would like to
see in our aggregated industry profile reports.
The PAIS Record of Entry form was designed to assist you in the submittal of the
following appraisal artifacts:
Soon after the end of the on-site activities:
•
Organization Questionnaire (for the appraised entity)
•
Project Questionnaire (for each appraised project)
•
Maturity Questionnaires (used in the appraisal)
•
Final Findings Briefing Including KPA Profiles
or
•
Interim Profile - Final Organization Profile
•
Interim Profile - Final Project Profiles
Soon after the following are written:
•
Final Report
•
Action Plans
In order to produce the customer requested industry profile reports, certain questions
from the Organization and Project questionnaires have been duplicated in the PAIS form.
It is not necessary to complete the OQ or PQ questions in the PAIS form if you are
enclosing the actual questionnaires in your submittal.
Confidentiality
Letter and SEI
Nondisclosure
Agreement
All appraisal result information submitted to the SEI is treated as proprietary and kept
confidential within the SEI.
At no time will specific individuals or organizations
be named in SEI publications/presentations without permission.
The enclosed Confidentiality Letter and SEI Non-Disclosure Agreement are designed to
assist you in negotiation with the appraisal results' owner or sponsor to send the results to
the SEI.
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About the
Word Versions
The PAIS Record of Entry Form, Organization and Project Questionnaires were designed
to assist you with pre-onsite activities as well as for submitting/reporting appraisal results
to the SEI There has been a pattern, however, where the form and questionnaires have
been used well after the appraisal has ended. This makes completing the form and
questionnaires more difficult and the responses less accurate due to the time that has
expired.
To assist in this area we have converted the PAIS form and Organization and Project
questionnaires to Microsoft Word documents. You can begin using these documents
during your pre-onsite activities and update them on through to the end of the appraisal by
using Word.
It is our hope that by making these Word documents available, this will help in completing
our forms and increase the accuracy of the responses when you submit your appraisal
results to the SEI.
These Word documents appear like the printed form so that if you choose to fill them out
by hand (or distribute them to someone else onsite to fill out by hand) you can print the
forms from Word. Because of this, the instructions for using Word to fill out these forms
are not included in the actual document itself. Those instructions are included in the
following section below.
Use of the
Word Versions
While is it is not possible to support every word processor product and all of its versions
out on the market, we did select Microsoft Word due to its current global popularity and
availability at the SEI.
The Word version of our forms seem to work well with the releases listed below for the
Windows (NT/95) and Macintosh platforms:
•
•
•
Word97 or Version 8.0
Word95 or Version 7.0
Word Version 6.0
However, we can not guarantee that it will work on every computer configuration within
this group since we can not control those configurations. If you are unable to use these
documents, then please use their paper versions.
The Word documents can not and should not be modified. Only the sections in the
document for your responses can be changed. We kindly ask that you do not modify any
other section. If we receive a modified document there may be a delay in processing your
results, as we will need to contact you.
These simple Word documents do not contain any macros (or logic). Not everyone will
have virus detectors that can find macro viruses so these documents do not have any smart
logic to assist with entry. The second reason for not including macros is that once these
documents are copied (virus free from our Web site and from the CBA IPI Assessment
Kit) they can pick up viruses if distributed from an infected computer.
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Use of the
Word Versions
(Continued)
To use the Word document once copied from our Web site (see address below) or CBA
IPI Assessment Kit:
Start up Word and open either the:
PAIS Record of Entry Form
Organization Questionnaire
Project Questionnaire
Macintosh customers who have the appropriate software for reading Windows/DOS files should start Word
version 6.0 or later first and then open the document instead of double clicking on the Word document.
and press the TAB key to move to the first response area in the document. To move
to the next response area press the TAB key. On Windows machines, press SHIFT+TAB
to move back to a prior response section. With all platforms you can also use the scroll
bar to move up and down through the document.
To select a check box, simply click on it and an X will appear inside the box.
For the Organization Questionnaire, if you do decide to include an organization chart,
create a separate document with the chart and on the questionnaire please write a sentence
to refer to it.
Other than what has been stated above, these Word documents behave much like any
other Word document. Be sure to save during your editing and when you are finished.
Printing
You can print the document if you would rather fill it out by hand or print it with the
responses you entered with Word. In order for the printed document to appear correctly,
please make sure your margins are set as follows:
Left
Right
Top
Bottom
Header
Footer
Maturity
Questionnaire
0.5"
0.5"
0.5"
0.5"
0.25"
0.25"
A Word version of the Maturity Questionnaire will not be made available for several
reasons. It is unclear if this questionnaire is used in all appraisals. If it is used, the volume
in which it would be distributed might become unmanageable using the Word document
mechanism. Also the questionnaire responses need to be reduced to a response summary
requiring some form of manual counting or database activity.
The Software Engineering Measurement and Analysis team does offer a processing service
for the Maturity Questionnaire if you decide to distribute a large volume of these
questionnaires in your appraisal. Please contact us at:
pais@sei.cmu.edu
for more information and for the fee for this service.
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SEI
Nondisclosure
Agreement
If you need to use the SEI Nondisclosure Agreement in order to submit the appraisal
results, you will need to send that document to the SEI by regular mail since it is a signed
document. All other information can be sent in using electronic mail if you choose.
Submittals
by E-Mail
There are a few things you should carefully weigh before using this ability.
If the sponsor of the appraisal has concerns with using Internet mail to send his/her's
appraisal results to the SEI, then please use regular mail.
There is a minimum set of artifacts that must be included when reporting appraisals to the
SEI. They are:
For any CMM for software based appraisal being reported, a completed:
PAIS Record of Entry Form
Organization Questionnaire
or completed OQ section in the PAIS form
Project Questionnaires for each appraised project
or completed PQ section in the PAIS form for each appraised project
For Interim Profile Appraisals:
Final Organization Profile
Final Project Profiles
For All Other Appraisals (CBA IPI, SPA ...):
Final Findings Briefing Including KPA Profiles
While there are several software products that can be used to create the Final Findings
Briefing or Organization/Project Profiles, not all of these software products are available
at the SEI. Also within a certain product there maybe several versions which when
converting from one to another some material can get lost.
Currently at the SEI we can process documents created from the following products only:
* Word97
* PowerPoint97
* FrameMaker 5.0
Adobe Acrobat
*
and prior versions it can support
and prior versions it can support
and prior versions it can support
Portable File Document (PDF)
We have noticed that some formatting or graphics will get lost in the conversion when opening a
document saved in a prior version of this product.
In the future, if later versions/releases of these products are available you will have to save
your documents down to the versions listed above before sending them to the SEI (we
may not have the latest releases at the same time you do).
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Submittals
E-Mail
(Continued)
If you have an e-mail product that supports attached files and can provide the appraisal by
artifacts in one of the formats mentioned above, then you can submit your appraisal to the
SEI through electronic mail (see address below). In your e-mail message please include:
Your Name
Phone Number where you can be reached
For each attached document please include:
What the document is (PAIS form, OQ, PQ, Final Briefing...)
The filename and size of document (3k or 3meg)
The product used to create the document and version of that product
The platform the document was created on (Win NT/95/3.1 or Macintosh)
Don't forget to attach each document before sending your e-mail message.
If we receive an attached e-mail document and can not access it by one of the products
above, we will have to contact you and request you send your appraisal results by regular
mail. We will also contact you if your document appears as if it is missing information
when converting up to the product versions listed above.
All attached documents will be scanned for viruses. If one is detected, you will be
contacted immediately and requested to send the results of the appraisal through regular
mail.
Addresses
The Word document versions of the PAIS form, OQ and PQ will be included in the CBA
IPI Assessment Kit and can also be found at the SEI Web site at:
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/sema/packet.html
To submit/report an appraisal to the SEI using regular attached e-mail, send your message
as outlined above with attached documents to:
pais@sei.cmu.edu
We hope these improvements will be a benefit to all that are involved with this process.
We look forward to working with you on these new capabilities. If you have any thoughts
or feedback, we would love to hear from you at:
pais@sei.cmu.edu
Thank you for taking the time to read this material. Your cooperation in sending in appraisal results to the SEI is
greatly appreciated.
If there are other individuals in your organization who may now or in the future submit appraisal results to the
SEI, please pass this information onto them.
Software Engineering Measurement and Analysis Team
Software Engineering Institute
®CMM is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
All other product names referenced herein are trademarks of their respective companies.
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