SEI SPRUCE Project: Curating Recommended Practices for Software Producibility

This paper describes the work that the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) performed on the Systems and Software Producibility Collaboration Environment (SPRUCE) from June 2013 to June 2014. The SEI pursued an alternative but complementary approach to the original Challenge Problem–Candidate Solution strategy of SPRUCE by creating content that would engage practitioners as well as researchers. The project resulted in recommended practices on five software topics: Agile at Scale, Safety-Critical Systems, Monitoring Software-Intensive System Acquisition Programs, Managing Intellectual Property in the Acquisition of Software-Intensive Systems, and Managing Operational Resilience. These five practices were published as web pages, and webinars were released on two of the topics. This paper describes this expanded vision for SPRUCE; an approach to curating recommended practices on complex topics and making them available to a broad community; and the results achieved in developing the practices, disseminating them to the public, and developing a curation process. The paper ends with a suggested way forward to continue to engage the community.