Appendix A: Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) 1

Overview

• Understand what CMMI is today and where it evolved from.

• Understand the structure and key components of CMMI.

• Understand the relationship between CMMI and MSF 4.0 for CMMI Process Improvement.

If you ponder how quickly the business and technological landscape changes from year to year, you might wonder how any organization can survive. An organization’s ability to simply exist depends directly on its ability to adapt. However, change is a tricky subject. Most organizations understand that change is good, but they struggle with the question of what should be driving the business changes. Change may be essential to survival; however, change without direction, purpose, or control could be detrimental.

What if we take the problem of change to the paradigm of software development? Let’s face it: in general, most organizations aren’t very good at software development. When it comes to the construction of software, organizations tend to struggle to understand what they are about to build, how to design it, how to plan for it, and how to deliver on time and on budget without sacrificing quality. If you are part of a savvy organization, you’ll likely learn from your mistakes, and you might evolve your software development practices and methodologies to better suit your company’s specific needs. You might wonder, however, whether there could be a common way for organizations to advance their software development processes. Can a model of gradual and continual improvement be created that allows organizations to increase their productivity while increasing the quality of the software they create? This is where the Capability Maturity Model comes in.

The Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) was developed at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) to provide organizations with a framework of process improvement. CMMI was formed to provide guidance around improving an organization’s processes and their ability to manage the development, acquisition, and maintenance of products and services. CMMI is probably best known for its appraisal techniques that work to quantify and qualify existing organizational processes. You might have heard of CMMI Level 3 or Level 5 as a way to indicate the relative maturity of an organization according to this model. You might have also heard the rumor, likely started by developers, of CMMI being the prohibitor of creativity, replacing an organization’s dexterity with ceremony, processes, and endless documentation. Although it is true that the level of record keeping and tracking required to achieve higher levels of CMMI certification is increased, the pain associated with this effort is much more a function of the tools used to track and record related information than it is the need for the information itself. The goal of CMMI was never to smother creativity with documentation and process but to increase the ability to repeat success through predictable quality and productivity.

Note 

The SEI was founded in 1984 to advance the state of the practice of software engineering and to serve as a national resource in software engineering and technology. The SEI is a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the United States Department of Defense and operated by Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Although the SEI’s primary customers are defense contractors, any organization is welcome to take advantage of the many available resources on their Web site ( http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmmi).

The information contained within the walls of CMMI helps to paint a picture of what your processes should accomplish and provides guidance for your ongoing process improvement initiatives. These initiatives span an entire spectrum of activities and focus areas required to develop, acquire, and maintain products and services. CMMI not only provides targets for your processes and practices, it also lays down a framework that supports ongoing process improvement, recognizing that change needs to be managed and cultured for it to be successful. CMMI does all of this by focusing on improving your organization’s process infrastructure through training and standardization in addition to providing guidance on how to plan for and support process improvement, adoption, and standardization activities.

^[1]Special permission to use “Capability Maturity Model Integration® (Version 1.1): CMMI® for Systems Engineering, Software Engineering, Integrated Product and Process Development, and Supplier Sourcing” (CMMI-SE/SW/IPPD/SS, V1.1), Copyright 2002 by Carnegie Mellon University, in Managing Projects with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System is granted by the Software Engineering Institute.
THIS CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY AND SOFTWARE ENGINEERING INSTITUTE MATERIAL IS FURNISHED ON AN “AS-IS” BASIS. CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY MAKES NO WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, AS TO ANY MATTER INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, WARRANTY OF FITNESS FOR PURPOSE OR MERCHANTABILITY, EXCLUSIVITY, OR RESULTS OBTAINED FROM USE OF THE MATERIAL CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY DOES NOT MAKE ANY WARRANTY OF ANY KIND WITH RESPECT TO FREEDOM FROM PATENT, TRADEMARK, OR COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT.
The SEI and CMU do not directly or indirectly endorse this publication.
®Capability Maturity Modeling, CMM and CMMI are registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by Carnegie Mellon University.