A Brief History of CMMI


The CMMI project was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) under the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense, Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics (OUSD/AT&L), which is, we agree, quite a mouthful even on a good day. A government organization may have been the primary sponsor of CMMI, but it took a committee of members from industry, government, and the SEI at Carnegie Mellon University to develop the CMMI framework, which is actually a combination of integrated CMMI models, an appraisal method, and all the supporting products and documentation you could want.

In all truth, CMMI is not really the first of its kind. As a matter of fact, the word Integrated in the title should have tipped you off that CMMI is a result of an integration of existing models, specifically:

  • SW-CMM for Software

  • EIA/IS 731 for System Engineering

  • IPD-CMM for Integrated Product and Process Development

SW-CMM

In the 1970s and 1980s, the United States Department of Defense saw many of its large software development projects result in spectacular failures. It needed a tool for evaluating the software development capabilities of defense contractors to avoid costly setbacks in the future. In 1986, Watts Humphrey, the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), and the Mitre Corporation responded to a request by the U.S. government and created a software maturity framework and associated questionnaires and appraisal methods. By 1991, the SEI published the Software Capability Maturity Model (SW-CMM) version 1.0, a comprehensive model that described the principles and practices that drive software process maturity, providing an evolutionary path to disciplined software development. By 1993, version 1.1 was released after two years of evaluation and further refinement.

Electronic Industries Alliance/Interim Standard (EIA/IS) 731

The evolution to and from EIA/IS 731, as intuitive as it may sound, wasn’t as clear cut as CMM for Software. EIA/IS 731 deals with the concept of systems engineering, which is a term used to group almost all system-related disciplines together under one umbrella term. Even before there was an official EIA/IS 731 standard, two different organizations attempted to model the process of systems engineering practices. The Enterprise Process Improvement Collaboration (EPIC) group, consisting of industry, academia, and government, released the Systems Engineering Capability Maturity Model (SE-CMM). Virtually at the same time, another group, called International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE), created a method for evaluating the capabilities of systems engineering organizations based on existing engineering standards. This method slowly evolved into its own maturity model called the Systems Engineering Capability Assessment Model (SECAM). At that time, both organizations decided to work closely with one another under the Electronic Industries Alliance (EIA) and ended up merging the models into a single standard now called the EIA/IS 731, also known as the Systems Engineering Capability Model (SECM).

IPD-CMM for Integrated Product and Process Development

Integrated Product and Process Development (IPPD) is a much more grand vision of change management because it deals with the way an organization works, its organizational structure, and overall behavior of its leaders. IPPD emphasizes the involvement of business stakeholders from all perspectives and throughout the entire life cycle. The IPD-CMM development team, which was established by EPIC and supported by many from the CE-CMM, took more than two years to make their submission to the CMMI effort, and they struggled to put together many incongruent and new IPPD concepts.

There are literally dozens of other standards that have influenced CMMI and its evolution. In fact, you can clearly see influences from ISO 15504, People CMM, Software Acquisition CMM, and System Security models. Each of these maintains its own structures, formats, and terms, which makes them somewhat difficult for anyone to integrate. Not only did CMMI work to build an initial set of integrated models and eventually improve upon the best practices from its underlying source models, it also worked to establish a framework to help integrate future models and create an associated set of appraisal and training residuals, as shown in Figure A-1.

image from book
Figure A-1: CMMI is truly an evolutionary offspring of many other models and provides a platform for future extensibility.




Managing Projects with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System
Managing Projects with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System
ISBN: 735622167
EAN: N/A
Year: 2007
Pages: 93

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