Section 6.13. Summary

6.13. Summary

Capability Maturity Model Integration is a process improvement framework established by the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. CMMI represents a collection of 22 Process Areas consisting of a series of industry-recognized best practices for IT development. Adopters use the Process Areas as a foundation upon which they develop processes and process program components.

Unofficially, the Process Areas can be organized as falling into four general categories:

• Project management: process areas to help you develop estimates, plan projects, monitor and control project status, manage suppliers and vendors, address and mitigate risks, and quantitatively project progress and process performance

• Project support: process areas to help you ensure the integrity of work products, address change control and change management, guide critical decision making, plan for and deploy root-cause analyses, measure process performance and product quality, and audit process and standards compliance

• Engineering: process areas to help you elicit, define, and manage requirements; develop and deploy appropriate technical solutions; coordinate product integration and assembly; verify and validate product performance; and conduct peer reviews

• Process management: process areas to help you institutionalize process assets across the organization, provide training on process program elements, and establish an environment for overall process improvement