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Tutorial

ABC: An Introduction to CMMI

Its proponents claim that Capability Maturity Model Integration can create better quality enterprise systems—as long as you follow its process for software development.

Is CMMI for everyone?

CMMI, for all its strengths, does not suit every organization. As with any framework or methodology, its implementation often fails, not necessarily because of flaws in the concepts, but because the organization's execution misfires.

Issues can be cultural. For example, CMMI has been called "death by process." If your people are not already strongly process-oriented, CMMI is likely unsuitable without extensive training (and possibly some attitude adjustments). Trying to overlay CMMI on existing processes without first doing a gap analysis to see if there's a fit can be a recipe for failure. Also, critics complain that CMMI (like CMM before it) demands a great deal of documentation from users.

Getting there is not necessarily half the fun, either. Appraisals and consultants can be very expensive. SEI says that an appraisal team consists of four to nine members (each of whom can cost more than $1,000 a day). And appraisals, like Rome, are not built in a day—or even two or three. The team doesn't just chat with a few people or look at one project; it does a serious examination of several projects.

What improvements can I expect?

SEI provides reports on performance improvements to give prospective users of the models an idea of improvements some have achieved. For example, one organization reported that achieving CMMI maturity level 3 allowed it to reduce its costs from rework by 42 percent over several years, and another described a 5:1 ROI for quality activities in a CMMI maturity level 3 organization. SEI provides several descriptions of quantified improvements that you can explore.

The following table from the SEI website contains a summary of the performance results reported by 25 organizations, stated in terms of performance change over time: