Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI)

What is Capability Maturity Model Integration?

The Capability Maturity Model Integration, or CMMI, is a process model that provides a clear definition of what an organization should do to promote behaviors that lead to improved performance. With five “Maturity Levels” or three “Capability Levels,” the CMMI defines the most important elements that are required to build great products, or deliver great services, and wraps them all up in a comprehensive model. The CMMI was developed at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University with representation from defense, industry, government, and academia, and is now operated and maintained by the CMMI Institute, an operating unit of CMU. It is the successor of the popular Software CMM or SW-CMM. The are multiple “flavors” of the CMMI, called “Constellations,” that include CMMI for Development (CMMI-DEV), CMMI for Services (CMMI-SVC), and CMMI for Acquisition (CMMI-ACQ). The three Constellations share a core set of sixteen Process Areas. There is also a “People CMM,” or P-CMM, that exists outside of the three CMMI Constellations.

An accepted, global best practice for the management and delivery of quality software services. CMMI® is a process improvement approach that provides organizations with the essential elements of effective processes. It can be used to guide process improvement across a project, a division, or an entire organization. CMMI® helps integrate traditionally separate organizational functions, set process improvement goals and priorities, provide guidance for quality processes, and provide a point of reference for appraising current processes.

Simply put, the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is a process and behavioral model that helps organizations streamline process improvement and encourage productive, efficient behaviors that decrease risks in software, product, and service development.

The CMMI Institute, on March 28, 2018, released its newest version of the CMMI model – CMMI v2.0 specifically for Development.

Structure of CMMI

The CMMI comes with two different representations - staged and continuous. The staged model, which groups process areas into 5 maturity levels, was also used in the ancestor software development CMM and is the representation used to achieve a "CMMI Level Rating" from a SCAMPI appraisal. The continuous representation, which was used in the ancestor systems engineering CMM, defines capability levels within each profile. The differences in the representations are solely organizational; the content is equivalent. The CMMI uses a common structure to describe each of the 25 process areas (PAs). A process area has 1 to 4 goals, and each goal is comprised of practices. Within the 22 PAs, these are called specific goals and practices, as they describe activities that are specific to a single PA. There is one additional set of goals and practices that apply in common across all of the PAs; these are called generic goals and practices.

How CMMI is Applied by Business

The stated goal of the CMMI Institute is to “Enable organizations to elevate and benchmark performance across a wide range of critical business capabilities, including product development, service excellence, workforce management, data management, supplier management, and cybersecurity.”

Organizations that want to better understand how their practices compare to CMMI best practices and want to implement CMMI practices often start with an appraisal. Generally, a business decides to be appraised for one or more reasons, including to:

• Evaluate how the organization’s processes compare to CMMI best practices and determine areas of improvement
• Share information with customers or suppliers about how the organization compares to CMMI best practices
• Comply with contractual terms of customers understanding How CMMI is Applied by Businesses

History of CMMI

CMMI was developed by the CMMI project, which aimed to improve the usability of maturity models by integrating many different models into one framework. The project consisted of members of industry, government, and the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI). The main sponsors included the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and the National Defense Industrial Association.

CMMI is the successor of the capability maturity model (CMM) or Software CMM. The CMM was developed from 1987 until 1997. In 2002, version 1.1 was released, version 1.2 followed in August 2006, and version 1.3 in November 2010. Some major changes in CMMI V1.3 are the support of agile software development, improvements to high-maturity practices, and alignment of the representation (staged and continuous).

According to the Software Engineering Institute (SEI, 2008), CMMI helps "integrate traditionally separate organizational functions, set process improvement goals and priorities, provide guidance for quality processes, and provide a point of reference for appraising current processes."[8]

Mary Beth Chrissis, Mike Konrad, and Sandy Shrum Rawdon were the authorship team for the hard copy publication of CMMI for Development Version 1.2 and 1.3. The Addison-Wesley publication of Version 1.3 was dedicated to the memory of Watts Humphry. Eileen C. Forrester, Brandon L. Buteau, and Sandy Shrum were the authorship team for the hard copy publication of CMMI for Services Version 1.3. Rawdon "Rusty" Young was the chief architect for the development of CMMI version 2.0. He was previously the CMMI Product Owner and the SCAMPI Quality Lead for the Software Engineering Institute.

In March 2016, the CMMI Institute was acquired by ISACA.

See Also

IT Capability Business Capability
Business Architecture
Business Model
Business Process
Business Analysis
Balanced Scorecard
Business Process Management
IT Strategy
eBusiness
e-Strategy
Business IT Alignment
IT Capability Maturity Framework (IT-CMF)
Capability Maturity Model (CMM)
Maturity Model

Further Reading

• Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) Definition and Solutions
• Capability Maturity Model® Integration (CMMI®) Overview