Process Performance Baseline

Overview

This chapter discusses several concepts associated with high-maturity organizations and offers some suggestions on how to transition to a high-maturity organization. We define a high-maturity organization as an organization operating at CMMI Maturity Level 4 or 5 or Capability Level 4 or 5. While there are many high-maturity concepts we could tackle, we focus on those concepts that most people consider confusing.

The most fundamental high-maturity concept is how measurements are handled at high maturity. Measures in this chapter refer to both base measures and derived measures. Base measures are simple values of some attribute of interest; for example, the size of a document in pages, or the effort to produce a document in hours. Derived measures are defined to be a function of two or more base measures. An example of a derived measure is productivity. Productivity is a function of the size of a produced work product divided by the time to produce it (i.e., design document productivity in pages per hour is the number of pages in the document divided by the hours to produce the document).

The high-maturity measurement concepts that we are going to cover are event level measurement, process performance baselines, and process performance models. Event level measures are best used to build process performance baselines. Process performance baselines are used to build process performance models. The process performance baselines and process performance models rely on the predictable and stable processes that we described in Chapter 18, "Statistical Process Control."

Exhibit 1: Example Process Performance Baseline for Productivity for New Development

PPB Elements	Upper Limit	Mean	Lower Limit	Unit of Measure
Requirements Definition	50.8	35	31.6	Hours/Complex Requirement
	29.2	21	15.8	Hours/Nominal Requirement
	13.4	8.6	5.2	Hours/Simple Requirement
Design	81.4	49.8	43.6	Hours/Complex Requirement
	44.4	31.7	21.2	Hours/Nominal Requirement
	19.6	13.3	5.5	Hours/Simple Requirement
Implementation	13.4	8.6	5.4	Hours/Interface
	35.4	17.7	10.3	Hours/Design Page
	6.54	4.31	3.21	Hours/Object
Integration	301.5	153.5	23.5	Hours/Subsystem
	32.5	16.8	7.8	Hours/Component
Systems Test	19.52	12.4	8.3	Hours/Test Scenario