Understanding Levels

Levels are used in CMMI to describe the evolutionary path recommended for an organization that wants to improve the processes it uses to develop and maintain its products and services. CMMI supports two improvement paths. The first path en ables organizations to incrementally improve processes corresponding to an individual process area (or process areas) selected by the organization. The second path enables organizations to improve a set of related processes by incrementally addressing successive sets of process areas.

These two improvement paths are associated with two types of levels that correspond to the two representations discussed in chapter 1. For the continuous representation, we use the term capability level. For the staged representation, we use the term maturity level.

Regardless of which representation you select, the concept of levels is the same. Levels characterize improvement from an ill-defined state to a state that uses quantitative information to determine and manage improvements that are needed to meet an organization's business objectives. This improvement path is similar to the one described for generic goals in chapter 3.

To reach a particular level, an organization must satisfy all of the appropriate goals of the process area or set of process areas that are targeted for improvement, regardless of whether it is a capability or maturity level.

Both representations provide ways to implement process improvement to achieve business objectives. Both representations provide the same essential content and use the same model components.