Introduction to CMMI for Development: Guidelines for Process Integration and Product Improvement, 3rd Edition

Mar 23, 2011

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This chapter introduces CMMI for Development (CMMI-DEV), which 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.

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CMMI for Development: Guidelines for Process Integration and Product Improvement, 3rd Edition

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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 components are built in-house and some are acquired; then all the components 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 business 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.¹

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.

About Process Improvement

In its research to help organizations to develop and maintain quality products and services, the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) has found several dimensions that an organization can focus on to improve its business. Figure 1.1 illustrates the three critical dimensions that organizations typically focus on: people, procedures and methods, and tools and equipment.

Figure 1.1 The Three Critical Dimensions

What holds everything together? It is the processes used in your organization. Processes allow you to align the way you do business. They allow you to address scalability and provide a way to incorporate knowledge of how to do things better. Processes allow you to leverage your resources and to examine business trends.

This is not to say that people and technology are not important. We are living in a world where technology is changing at an incredible speed. Similarly, people typically work for many companies throughout their careers. We live in a dynamic world. A focus on process provides the infrastructure and stability necessary to deal with an ever-changing world and to maximize the productivity of people and the use of technology to be competitive.

Manufacturing has long recognized the importance of process effectiveness and efficiency. Today, many organizations in manufacturing and service industries recognize the importance of quality processes. Process helps an organization's workforce to meet business objectives by helping them to work smarter, not harder, and with improved consistency. Effective processes also provide a vehicle for introducing and using new technology in a way that best meets the business objectives of the organization.

Looking Ahead

by Watts Humphrey

Nearly 25 years ago when we first started the maturity model work that led to the CMM and CMMI, we took a diagnostic approach. What are the characteristics of organizations that performed good software work? We were following the principle that Tolstoy stated in Anna Karenina.²

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

In applying the Tolstoy principle to software organizations, we looked for those markers that characterized effective software operations and then formed these characteristics into a maturity model. The logic for the maturity model was that, to do good work, organizations must do everything right. However, since no one could possibly fix all of their problems at once, our strategy was to determine what organizations were doing and compare that to what they should be doing to be a "happy family." Then, using the model as a guide, they should start fixing the omissions and mistakes in the order defined by the model.

Keep Doing the Good Things

Unfortunately, we were not sufficiently clear with our initial guidance, and some people felt that, if they were only trying to get to maturity level 2, they should not do things that were at levels 3, 4, and 5. That is not what we meant. Organizations should continue doing all of the "good" things they now are doing and only focus on the problem areas. The objective at level 2 is to address those level 2 things that are missing or inadequate, and fix them first. Then the organization should consider addressing the level 3, 4, and 5 gaps. Again, they should not stop doing any things that work.

The Logic for the Maturity Level 2

The logic that we followed in establishing the maturity levels was as follows. First, organizations cannot do good work, and they certainly cannot improve, if they are in a perpetual state of crisis. Therefore, the first improvement efforts should focus on those things that, if done poorly or not at all, will result in crises. These are planning, configuration management, requirements management, subcontract management, quality assurance, and the like.

The Logic for Maturity Level 3

Second, after the crises are largely controlled and the organization is plan-driven rather than crisis-driven, the next step is learning. How can people learn from each other rather than having to learn from their own mistakes? Again, from Tolstoy's principle, there is an infinite number of ways to fail, so improving by reacting to failures is a never-ending and fruitless struggle. The key is to find out what works best in the organization and to spread that across all groups. Therefore, maturity level 3 focuses on learning-oriented things like process definition, training, and defined ways to make decisions and evaluate alternatives.

The Logic for Maturity Levels 4 and 5

At level 4, the focus turns to quantitative management and quality control, and at level 5, the efforts include continuous improvement, technological innovations, and defect prevention. Unfortunately, we never included an explicit requirement in CMM or CMMI that high-maturity organizations must look outside of their own laboratories to identify best industry practices. Then, after they find these practices, they should measure, evaluate, and prototype them to see if these practices would help improve their operations. This seemed like such an obvious step that we never explicitly required it. However, judging from the slow rate of adoption of new and well-proven software and systems development innovations, such a requirement should have been included in the model.

Continuous Improvement

At this point, of the many organizations that have been evaluated at CMMI level 5, too many have essentially stopped working on improvement. Their objective was to get to level 5 and they are there, so why should they keep improving? This is both an unfortunate and an unacceptable attitude. It is unfortunate because there are many new concepts and methods that these organizations would find beneficial, and it is unacceptable because the essence of level 5 is continuous improvement.

Unfortunately, many organizations have become entangled in the weeds of process improvement and have lost sight of the forest and even of the trees. Six Sigma is a powerful and enormously helpful statistically based method for improvement, but it is easy for people to become so enamored with these sophisticated methods that they lose sight of the objective. This is a mistake. The key is priorities and what will help organizations to improve their business performance. This is where external benchmarking and internal performance measures are needed. Use them to establish improvement priorities and then focus your improvement muscle on those areas that will substantially improve business performance.

Next Steps

While CMMI has been enormously successful, we have learned a great deal in the last 25 years, and there are now important new concepts and methods that were not available when we started. The key new concept concerns knowledge work. Peter Drucker, the leading management thinker of the twentieth century, defined knowledge work as work that is done with ideas and concepts rather than with things. While a great deal of today's technical work is knowledge work, large-scale knowledge work is a relatively new phenomenon. Except for software, until recently, the really big projects all concerned hardware systems. Now, however, software work pervades most parts of modern systems, and even the work of hardware designers more closely resembles that of software developers than traditional hardware bread boarding and manufacturing.

To properly manage this new kind of work, new methods are needed, and Drucker enunciated the key new management concept. This is that knowledge work can't be managed with traditional methods; the knowledge workers must manage themselves.³ The logic behind Drucker's view is compelling, but the story is too extensive to cover in this short perspective. However, there is a growing number of publications that describe knowledge work and how and why new management methods are needed.⁴

In summary, the key point is that software and complex systems development projects are large-scale knowledge work, and the reason such projects have long been troubled is that they have not been managed with suitable methods. The first method that has been designed to follow Drucker's knowledge-management principles is the Team Software Process (TSP), but there will almost certainly be more such methods in the future.

Using the TSP to guide software and systems development projects turns out to be highly effective, and TSP projects are typically delivered on schedule, within budget, and with substantially improved quality and productivity.⁵ To assist CMMI users in continuously improving their performance, the SEI has defined a new CMMI-based strategy and a family of practices to guide them in evaluating and piloting these methods. This method is called CMMI-AIM (Accelerated Improvement Method), and it is currently in use by a growing number of organizations.

Conclusions

As we continue refining our processes and methods to address the needs and practices of creative teams and people, new opportunities will keep showing up for broadening the scope of our processes and including new methods and technologies as they become available. Because many of these advances will be new to most users, users will need specific guidance on what these new methods are and how to best use them. The SEI strategy has been to provide this guidance for each new family of methods as it becomes available and is proven in practice.

Two examples of such new methods are CMMI- and TSP-related guidance on how to develop secure systems and on how to architect complex systems. As we look to the future, there will be many more opportunities for improving the performance of our systems and software engineering work. The key is to couple these methods into a coherent improvement framework such as TSP-CMMI and to provide the explicit guidance organizations need to obtain the potential benefits of these new methods. To avoid chasing the latest fads, however, organizations should measure their own operations, evaluate where they stand relative to their leading peers and competitors, and focus on those improvements that will measurably improve their business performance.

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