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Why
CMM Level 5?
What is CMM (SEI Capability Maturity Model)?
According to the
Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute, CMM is a common-sense
application of software or business process management and quality improvement
concepts to software development and maintenance. It's a community-developed
guide for evolving towards a culture of engineering excellence, model for
organizational improvement.
The Capability Maturity Model for Software (CMM) is a framework that describes
the key elements of an effective software process. There are CMMs for non
software processes as well, such as Business Process Management (BPM). The CMM
describes an evolutionary improvement path from an ad hoc, immature process to a
mature, disciplined process. The CMM covers practices for planning, engineering,
and managing software development and maintenance. When followed, these key
practices improve the ability of organizations to meet goals for cost, schedule,
functionality, and product quality. The CMM establishes a yardstick against
which it is possible to judge, in a repeatable way, the maturity of an
organization's software process and compare it to the state of the practice of
the industry. The CMM can also be used by an organization to plan improvements
to its software process. It also reflects the needs of individuals performing
software process, improvement, software process assessments, or software
capability evaluations; is documented; and is publicly available.
Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) Maturity Levels The Five Maturity
Levels described by the Capability Maturity Model. They can be characterized as
per their primary process changes made at each level as follows:
Level 1:
Initial The software process is characterized as ad hoc, and occasionally even
chaotic. Few processes are defined, and success depends on individual effort and
heroics.
Level 2: Repeatable Basic project management processes are
established to track cost, schedule, and functionality. The necessary process
discipline is in place to repeat earlier successes on projects with similar
applications.
Level 3: Defined The software process for both management and
engineering activities is documented, standardized, and integrated into a
standard software process for the organization. All projects use an approved,
tailored version of the organization's standard software process for developing
and maintaining software.
Level 4: Managed Detailed measures of the software
process and product quality are collected. Both the software process and
products are quantitatively understood and controlled.
Level 5: Optimizing
Continuous process improvement is enabled by quantitative feedback from the
process and from piloting innovative ideas and technologies.
(More...)
The structure of the Capability Maturity model is as shown
below:
At the Optimizing Level or the CMM level5, the entire organization is focused on
continuous Quantitative feedback from previous projects is used to improve the
project management, usually using pilot projects, using the skills shown in
level 4. The focus is on continuous process improvement.
Software project teams in SEI CMM Level 5 organizations analyze defects to
determine their causes. Software processes are evaluated to prevent known types
of defects from recurring, and lessons learned are disseminated to other
projects. The software process capability of Level 5 organizations can be
characterized as continuously improving because Level 5 organizations are
continuously striving to improve the range of their process capability, thereby
improving the process performance of their projects. Improvement occurs both by
incremental advancements in the existing process and by innovations using new
technologies and methods.
Capability Maturity
Model (CMM) Process Area (PA) Previously known as Key Process Area
(KPA)
A process area (PA) contains the goals that must be reached in order to improve
a software process. A PA is said to be satisfied when procedures are in place to
reach the corresponding goals. A software organization has achieved a specific
maturity level once all the corresponding PAs are satisfied. The process areas
(PA's) have the following features:
Identify a cluster of related activities
that, when performed collectively, achieve a set of goals considered important
for enhancing process capability.
Define to reside at a single maturity
level.
Identify the issues that must be
addressed to achieve a maturity level.
The
different maturity levels have different process areas pre-defined as shown in
the figure above. The SEI CMMI Level 5 has 3 PA's defined:
Process change
management:
Identify the causes of defects and
prevent them from recurring.
Technology change management:
Identify beneficial new technology and
transfer them in an orderly manner
Defect prevention:
Continually improve the process to
improve quality, increase productivity, and decrease development time.
The purpose of Process Change Management is to continually improve the software
processes used in the organization with the intent of improving software
quality, increasing productivity, and decreasing the cycle time for product
development. When software process improvements are approved for normal
practice, the organization's standard software process and the projects' defined
software processes are revised as suited.
The goals sought to achieve are as follows:
Continuous
process improvement is planned. Participation in the organization's software
process improvement activities is organization wide.
The
organization's standard software process and the projects defined software
processes are improved continuously.
These defined
standards give the organization a commitment to perform because:
The organization follows a written policy for
implementing software process improvements.
Senior
management sponsors the organization's activities for software process
improvement.
The ability of the organization to perform transpires because:
Adequate resources and funding are provided for
software process improvement activities.
Software
managers receive required training in software process improvement.
The managers and technical staff of the software
engineering group and other software-related groups receive required training in
software process improvement.
Senior management
receives required training in software process improvement.
Capability Maturity Model (CMM) Process Area (PA) Activities The Activities
performed include:
A software process improvement program
is established which empowers the members of the organization to improve the
processes of the organization.
The group responsible for
the organization's software process activities coordinates the software process
improvement activities.
The organization develops
and maintains a plan for software process improvement according to a documented
procedure. The software process improvement activities are performed in
accordance with the software process improvement plan. Software process
improvement proposals are handled according to a documented procedure.
Members of the organization actively participate in
teams to develop software process improvements for assigned process areas.
Where appropriate, the software process improvements are
installed on a pilot basis to determine their benefits and effectiveness before
they are introduced into normal practice. When the decision is made to transfer
a software process improvement into normal practice, the improvement is
implemented according to a documented procedure. Records of software process
improvement activities are maintained.
Software managers
and technical staff receive feedback on the status and results of the software
process improvement activities on an event-driven basis.
The primary purpose of periodic reviews by senior management is to provide
awareness of, and insight into, software process activities at an appropriate
level of abstraction and in a timely manner. The time between reviews should
meet the needs of the organization and may be lengthy, as long as adequate
mechanisms for exception reporting are available.
The
Capability Maturity Model has been criticized in that, that it does not describe
how to create an effective software development organization. The traits it
measures are in practice very hard to develop in an organization, even though
they are very easy to recognize. However, it cannot be denied that the
Capability Maturity Model reliably assesses an organization's sophistication
about software development.
The CMM was invented to give
military officers a quick way to assess and describe contractors' abilities to
provide correct software on time. It has been a roaring success in this role. So
much so that it caused panic-stricken salespeople to clamor for their
engineering organizations to "implement CMM" with CMM level 5 being the
ultimate.
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