What Is CMMI and Why Should You Care?

What does it look like?

The SEI found that successful projects had at least one of two things in common.  They either did a generic set of basic processes across the board, or they did processes very specific to their line of work extremely well.  In all, the SEI identified 25 total process areas and put them into the CMMI.  

There are two ways to apply the 25 processes depending on which approach suits the development shop best.  They can choose to apply pre-determined processes in a specific sequence to achieve "maturity" in managing development, or, they can choose the processes most important to their business and apply the necessary rigor to achieve a "capability" for managing development.

The "maturity" scale has 5 levels, 1 through 5: ad hoc, repeatable, defined, quantitatively managed and optimizing.  And, the "capability" scale has 6 levels, 0 through 5: incomplete, performed, managed, defined, quantitatively managed, and optimizing.  The differences are the subject of several articles available on the SEI’s Web site (www.sei.cmu.edu).  Because the "maturity" levels are pre-defined, the approach is called "staged."  The "capability" approach is called "continuous" because the performance of the processes are tied to business objectives (which can change) and are defined less specifically by the model.

Basically, "immature" development organizations do things in an "ad hoc" manner, i.e. "staged" level 1, and "incapable" organizations "incompletely" do what they must to get the job needed by the business done, i.e. "continuous" level 0.  Unfortunately, even with CMM/CMMI now available for over a decade, most software companies still operate at these levels.

However, companies providing custom software to the Federal government are required to be assessed to level 2, and increasingly to level 3.  Due to the straight-forward definition of the "staged" representation, it is quite popular with government contractors and their clients.

Why should you care?

The first reason is above, the other reason is: competition.  Your competition may already be applying the CMMI.  What if your competition not only institutes the industry's best practices, but reaps the benefits of doing it?  Even though the CMM was developed based on "large and complex" software projects, its business value has been recognized by companies of every size and in every industry.  Companies are even using their CMM/I appraisals in their marketing strategies.

Another reason to consider implementing CMMI: with very few exceptions, subcontractors providing custom software to companies creating solutions for the government must either themselves be following CMMI, or be covered by their client.  In fact, all the parts of the software product delivered to the government must be following CMMI somewhere in the supply chain.  This means that either your client is covering for you and your lack of CMMI, or they're going to ask you to follow it too.

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