In 2006, the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University developed the Capability Maturity Model Integration, which has largely superseded the CMM and addresses some of its drawbacks.
[1] The Capability Maturity Model was originally developed as a tool for objectively assessing the ability of government contractors' processes to implement a contracted software project.
Individuals such as Edward Yourdon,[7] Larry Constantine, Gerald Weinberg,[8] Tom DeMarco,[9] and David Parnas began to publish articles and books with research results in an attempt to professionalize the software-development processes.
In an effort to determine why this was occurring, the United States Air Force funded a study at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI).
At the request of the U.S. Air Force he began formalizing his Process Maturity Framework to aid the U.S. Department of Defense in evaluating the capability of software contractors as part of awarding contracts.
The result of the Air Force study was a model for the military to use as an objective evaluation of software subcontractors' process capability maturity.
Watts Humphrey's Capability Maturity Model (CMM) was published in 1988[14] and as a book in 1989, in Managing the Software Process.
[3] The CMM was published as a book[4] in 1994 by the same authors Mark C. Paulk, Charles V. Weber, Bill Curtis, and Mary Beth Chrissis.
The CMMI was originally intended as a tool to evaluate the ability of government contractors to perform a contracted software project.
A maturity model can be viewed as a set of structured levels that describe how well the behaviors, practices and processes of an organization can reliably and sustainably produce required outcomes.