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Measure Your Maturity With CMM
How is your development process working? Use CMM to determine which processes are doing well, and what needs improvement.
by Brian Noyes
Posted August 5, 2002
Most of the software process articles on FTPOnline's Managing Development site focus on different methodologies, what comprises them, how to determine if the methodology will work for you, and a little on how to implement them. In this article, however, I'll focus on how to determine how well you're doing with a software process. One of the biggest problems many organizations have with their processes is figuring out how to determine whether they're doing everything they need to do, and if not, what they must do to improve.
Back in the early 1990s, the software industry's shortfalls began coming into view. Too many projects were being delivered extremely late, over budget, and with too many failures and flaws in the final products. The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University stepped up to the plate and developed the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) as a way to capture the process elements, practices, and artifacts necessary during a product's software development lifecycle. CMM was not extremely detailed, and in some ways it seemed like common sense—the only problem was hardly anyone performed all the basic tasks CMM outlined.
Depending on what you do in the software industry, CMM might be an unfamiliar concept. It's well known in government software development. For some government contracts, you can't even bid on the work unless you are certified by SEI as having achieved a certain CMM level. Big corporations also have been using CMM for large projects as a means to manage the complexities of large software development teams and measure how they are doing. But small companies probably haven't heard of it, and unless you have government customers who demand it, you probably don't want to bother with certification. One of CMM's biggest criticisms is that it tends to push companies toward a process model similar to the waterfall software development model, which the majority of the software industry recognizes as too rigid for real success.
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