About CMMI

The Software Engineering Institute's (SEI) Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI®) is a model for organizational maturity and continuous improvement of capability intended to help a business be more effective through improved quality and reliability of its operations. The inspiration for CMMI® is rooted in the work of quality and continuous improvement gurus Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran, though the maturity model, with its five levels, are based on work by Philip Crosby.

MSF for CMMI® Process Improvement provides process guidance designed to accelerate the achievement of Level 3 - Defined Process - in the staged representation of the model. Using this process template is no guarantee of receiving a level 3 appraisal, indeed only 17 of the 21 process areas are covered. However, this process template has been designed to enable a software development organization to achieve level 3 with a minimum of bureaucracy and the lightest possible documentation set.

MSF for CMMI® Process Improvement tries hard to maintain the original spirit of the CMMI® and focuses heavily on the teachings of Edwards Deming and the work of his mentor Walter Shewhart in understanding variation and the management of process rather than conformance to specification or plan. There is an assumption that CMMI® compliant organizations must be hierarchical command and control structures with top-down decision making. And, that there processes must be autocratic and bureaucratic designed to audit conformance to plan and conformance to specification whilst identifying those accountable for any deviation, thus enabling the pointing of the finger of blame. This leads to the systemic effect that an organization becomes filled with fear, slow moving, weighed down in paperwork, and lacking in trust. The net effect is low productivity and poor return on investment. MSF for CMMI® Process Improvement addresses these concerns by focusing on process, understanding variation, and managing through the reduction of variation through use of quality assurance, risk and issue management and improved engineering techniques introduced under controlled conditions. This encourages functional behavior through better team working, knowledge sharing and improvement suggestions.