Capability Maturity Model Integration

Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is a process level improvement training and appraisal program.

CMMI models provide guidance for developing or improving processes that meet the business goals of an organization.

The project consisted of members of industry, government and the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI).

Some major changes in CMMI V1.3 [5] are the support of agile software development,[6] improvements to high maturity practices[7] and alignment of the representation (staged and continuous).

"[9] Mary Beth Chrissis, Mike Konrad, and Sandy Shrum Rawdon were the authorship team for the hard copy publication of CMMI for Development Version 1.2 and 1.3.

Eileen C. Forrester, Brandon L. Buteau, and Sandy Shrum were the authorship team for the hard copy publication of CMMI for Services Version 1.3.

The staged representation is designed to provide a standard sequence of improvements, and can serve as a basis for comparing the maturity of different projects and organizations.

In version 2.0 DEV, ACQ and SVC were merged into a single model where each process area potentially has a specific reference to one or more of these three aspects.

There are three classes of appraisals, A, B and C, which focus on identifying improvement opportunities and comparing the organization's processes to CMMI best practices.

This approach promotes that members of the EPG and PATs be trained in the CMMI, that an informal (SCAMPI C) appraisal be performed, and that process areas be prioritized for improvement.

More modern approaches, that involve the deployment of commercially available, CMMI-compliant processes, can significantly reduce the time to achieve compliance.

SEI has maintained statistics on the "time to move up" for organizations adopting the earlier Software CMM as well as CMMI.

[18] The SEI published a study saying 60 organizations measured increases of performance in the categories of cost, schedule, productivity, quality and customer satisfaction.

A small company with few resources may be less likely to benefit from CMMI; this view is supported by the process maturity profile (page 10).

Turner & Jain (2002) argue that although it is obvious there are large differences between CMMI and agile software development, both approaches have much in common.

For example, the XP requirements management approach, which relies on oral communication, was evaluated as not compliant with CMMI.