What is CMMI?

The Capability Maturity Model Integration, or CMMI, is a process model that provides a clear definition of what an organization should do to promote behaviours that lead to improved performance. With five “Maturity Levels” or three “Capability Levels,”

History of CMMI

Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is a process level improvement training and appraisal program. Administered by the CMMI Institute, a subsidiary of ISACA, it was developed at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). It is required by many United States Department of Defense (DoD) and U.S. Government contracts, especially in software development. CMU claims CMMI can be used to guide process improvement across a project, division, or an entire organization. CMMI defines the following maturity levels for processes: Initial, Managed, Defined, Quantitatively Managed, and Optimizing. CMMI is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by CMU.

Benefits of CMMI

To understand what the benefit of CMMI might be to your organization you need to think about what improved processes might mean for you. What would be the impact to your organization if project predictability was improved by 10%? What would be the impact if the cost of finding and fixing defects reduced by 10%? By benchmarking yourself before beginning process improvement, you will be looking to see that any process improvements made have a positive impact on the bottom line.

The CMMI helps us understand the answer to the question “how do we know?”

• How do we know what we are good at?
• How do we know if we’re improving?
• How do we know if the process we use is working well?
• How do we know if our requirements change process is useful?
• How do we know if our products are as good as they can be?

Savings

Turning to a real world example of the benefits of CMMI, Lockheed Martin, between 1996 and 2002 were able to increase software productivity by 30%, whilst decreasing the unit software cost by 20%.

Versions

Version 2.0 was published in 2018 (Version 1.3 was published in 2010)

Classification

Originally CMMI addresses three areas of interest:

1. Product and service development — CMMI for Development (CMMI-DEV),

2. Service establishment, management, — CMMI for Services (CMMI-SVC), and

3. Product and service acquisition — CMMI for Acquisition (CMMI-ACQ).

Abstract

It is important to realize that CMMI is a model and not a standard. In other words, for each area of practice it specifies a general intent and different levels of maturity in abstract terms; it does not provide a prescription how to achieve those levels. It does provide detailed abstract information and examples which serve as guidelines to understanding and implementations, but the particular way of implementing is up to the organization.

CMMI originated in software engineering but has been highly generalized over the years to embrace other areas of interest, such as the development of hardware products, the delivery of all kinds of services, and the acquisition of products and services. The word "software" does not appear in definitions of CMMI. This generalization of improvement concepts makes CMMI extremely abstract. It is not as specific to software engineering as its predecessor, the Software CMM.

Evolution

In version 2.0 these three areas (that previously had a separate model each) were merged into a single model (see below for details).

CMMI was developed by a group from industry, government, and the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at CMU. CMMI models provide guidance for developing or improving processes that meet the business goals of an organization. A CMMI model may also be used as a framework for appraising the process maturity of the organization. By January 2013, the entire CMMI product suite was transferred from the SEI to the CMMI Institute, a newly created organization at Carnegie Mellon.