PIID and SCAMPI Tool (PST)

The support provided by the SEI tool for the documentation of the Practice Implementation Indicator Database (PIID) and the performance of a SCAMPI appraisal is rather weak. Therefore, PST was developed by Ralf Kneuper, a SEI-certified SCAMPI Lead Appraiser, as a tool to support both these tasks and help in performing SCAMPI appraisals. Work on PST was supported by the Hochschule Darmstadt (Prof. Knoll).

The templates provided here are a collection of Excel workbooks based on the template provided by the SEI, but they additionally contain a lot of consistency checks, protection of fields that should not be changed etc. They include the texts from the SEI template. The workbooks as provided here are "pure" Excel and do not contain any macros. VBA macros are used to generate the workbooks and to provide some additional functions which are only available to registered users (see below).

PST supports both CMMI-DEV and CMMI-SVC v1.3, and SCAMPI A, B and C version 1.3. Maturity levels 4 and 5 are not supported but would be easy to add if there is a need. Similarly, CMMI-ACQ currently is not supported.

However, not all process areas are available for free download, see below.

PST is shareware

This set of templates is published as shareware. You are welcome to download and test it, but if you want to use it regularly I would ask you to pay EUR 1000,- per organization or per lead appraiser. This will include updates of PST that are published within the next two years, and you will get additional macros and the lead appraiser password that allows you to use some additional functionality to separately lock and unlock those parts of the template that are to be filled in by the PIID creators (the organisation) or the appraisal team.

The version provided here supports up to five basic units (the organization itself plus up to four projects). Should you need more, I am quite willing to generate a version with more basic units for registered users.

Some basic documentation is provided in the "Instructions" sheet of each workbook.

Functions not included yet

There are quite a few functions that would be useful to have but are not included in the current version, e.g. macros to transfer the findings to Powerpoint slides.

Obviously, users paying the registration fee or actively helping in development will speed up such extensions and will also have a say in what comes first.

Some of the functionality has been developed in VBA for Excel. To achieve high-quality code, development is based on the concepts in Professional Excel Development by Bullen, Bovey and Green. I can highly recommend this book since it is one of the few books about VBA that do not only describe the language itself but how to write good code.

Download

The tool is provided "as-is", with no guarantee for working correctly. Please test it yourself before you order it. To order, send me a short note with your relevant data via email, and you will receive an invoice. If you are based in the EU, please include your VAT ID, since otherwise I will have to charge you VAT.

You can download the current version 3.0.4 of PST here as a collection of zipped Excel files. No installation is necessary, just copy everything into a common directory.

The following functions are available as macros to registered users:

• Hiding and displaying selected information such as guidance information and selected instances.
• Transferring data from one sheet to another, e.g. to a newer version of the sheet or in order to deliver selected information back to the sponsor.
• Collect results (strengths, weaknesses, etc.) from different process areas into an Excel list where they can be filtered by project, by pratice, etc.
• Mark an instance as "NA" for a process area, to be used if this instance is not applicable or if it is not rated for the current process area. Note that the templates in general do not distinguish between "Not Applicable", "Not Yet" and "Not Rated".