Identify causes of selected outcomes and take action to improve process performance.
Provides guidance for applying CMMI® best practices in a development organization. Best practices in the model focus on activities for developing quality products and services to meet the needs of customers and end-users.
CMMI® (Capability Maturity Model® Integration) models are collections of best practices that help organizations to improve their processes. Product teams with experience in multiply industries, government, and the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) have developed these models. This model, called CMMI for Development (CMMI-DEV), provides a comprehensive, integrated set of guidelines for developing products and services.
Now more than ever, companies want to deliver products and services better, faster, and cheaper. At the same time, in the high-technology environment of the twenty-first century, nearly all organizations have found themselves building increasingly complex products and services. It is unusual today for a single organization to develop all the components that compose a complex product or service. More commonly, some modules are built in-house, and some are acquired; then, all the modules are integrated into the final product or service. Organizations must be able to manage and control this complex development and maintenance process.
The problems these organizations address today involve enterprise-wide solutions that require an integrated approach. Effective management of organizational assets is critical to business success. In essence, these organizations are product and service developers that need a way to manage their development activities as part of achieving their business objectives.
In the current marketplace, maturity models, standards, methodologies, and guidelines exist that can help an organization improve the way it does business. However, most available improvement approaches focus on a specific part of the organization and do not take a systemic approach to the problems that most organizations are facing. By focusing on improving one area of a business, these models have unfortunately perpetuated the stovepipes and barriers that exist in organizations.
CMMI® for Development (CMMI-DEV) provides an opportunity to avoid or eliminate these stovepipes and barriers. CMMI for Development consists of best practices that address development activities applied to products and services. It addresses practices that cover the product’s lifecycle from conception through delivery and maintenance. The emphasis is on the work necessary to build and maintain the total product.
CMMI-DEV contains 22 process areas. Of those process areas, 16 are core process areas, 1 is a shared process area, and 5 are development specific process areas.
All CMMI-DEV model practices focus on the activities of the developer organization. Five process areas focus on practices specific to development: addressing requirements development, technical solution, product integration, verification, and validation.
An organization needs to create a reliable environments where products, services and departments are proactive, efficient and productive.
Enabling an organization to product quality services or products; increase customer satisfaction; increase value for stockholder; achieve industry-wide recognition for excellence; and build a larger market share.
The movement to CMMI-based improvement has been accompanied by credible quantitative results for all six performance categories. Many organizations have achieved improvements in product quality and customer satisfaction at the same time that they have achieved higher productivity, cost performance, and schedule performance. Better quality may not always be free, but it can occur with better project performance as a result of disciplined process improvement.
