| This book maintains the integrity of the CMMI v1.1 models available on the SEI's Web site and serves as a guide for improvement of organizational processes. It is organized into three main parts: Part One About CMMI Part Two The Process Areas Part Three The Appendices and Glossary In writing this book, we enhanced and supplemented the original SEI materials. These improvements appear in Part One. Given the nature of the material in Part Two, we made only minor changes and added markings to identify and classify the content. In the glossary in Part Three, we've compiled a practical resource for understanding the "language" of CMMI. Part One, "About CMMI," consists of seven chapters: Chapter 1, "Introduction," offers a broad view of CMMI. It introduces you to the concepts of process improvement and describes the benefits of CMMI, the history of models used for process improvement, and different process improvement approaches. Chapter 2, "Process Area Components," describes all of the components of the CMMI process areas. Chapter 3, "Process Institutionalization," describes the model components that ensure that the implementation of processes is effective, repeatable, and lasting. Chapter 4, "Relationships among Process Areas," provides insight into the meaning and interactions of the major CMMI components. Chapter 5, "Tying It All Together," assembles the model components and process infrastructure into the representations and explains the concepts of maturity level and capability level. Chapter 6, "Using CMMI Models," describes paths to adoption and use of CMMI for process improvement and benchmarking. Chapter 7, "CMMI Case Study: United Space Alliance, LLC," describes the real-life experiences of an organization as it prepared to adopt CMMI. This chapter may help you plan your own organization's adoption of CMMI. Part Two, "The Process Areas," contains 25 sections, one for each of the CMMI process areas.[3] To facilitate your referring to them, these chapters are organized alphabetically by process area acronym. Each chapter contains descriptions of goals, best practices, and examples. [3] A "process area" is a cluster of related best practices in an area that, when implemented collectively, satisfy a set of goals considered important for making significant improvement in that area. We will cover this concept in detail in chapter 2.
Part Three, "The Appendices and Glossary," consists of four information resources: Appendix A, "References," contains references you can use to locate documented sources of information such as reports, process-improvement models, industry standards, and books that are related to CMMI. Appendix B, "Acronyms," defines the acronyms used in CMMI. Appendix C, "CMMI Project Participants," contains a list of people and their organizations who participated in the CMMI project. That project developed the models on which this book is based. The "Glossary" defines the terms used in CMMI. |
