Abstract
Software process improvement is concerned with practical action to improve the processes in the organization, to ensure that they meet business goals more effectively. For example, the business goal might be to develop and deliver high-quality software products faster to the marketplace, and so the associated processes need to be improved to achieve this. The origins of the software process improvement field go back to the manufacturing sector and to Walter Shewhart’s work on statistical process control in the 1930s. The Software Engineering Institute developed the Capability Maturity Model (CMM®) in the early 1990s as a framework to help software organizations improve their software process maturity. The CMMI is the successor to the older CMM, and its implementation brings best practice in software and systems engineering into the organization.
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- 1.
The SEI was founded by the US Congress in 1984, and it has been successful in advancing software engineering practices in the United States and worldwide. It performs research to find solutions to key software engineering problems, and its solutions are validated through pilots. These are then disseminated to the wider software engineering community through its training program.
- 2.
There is the well-known adage, “All models are wrong, some are useful.”
- 3.
However, the fact that a company has been appraised at a certain CMM or CMMI rating is no guarantee that it is performing effectively as a business. For example, the Motorola plant in India was assessed at CMM level 5 in the late 1990s, while Motorola fell behind in the GSM market.
- 4.
ISO 15504 (popularly known as SPICE) is an international standard for software process assessment. There are dedicated versions of SPICE for the automotive and medical device sectors.
References
Chrissis MB, Conrad M, Shrum S (2011) CMMI. Guidelines for process integration and product improvement, SEI series in software engineering, 3rd edn. Addison Wesley, Boston
Humphry W (1989) Managing the software process. Addison Wesley, Boston
O’Regan G (2010) Introduction to software process improvement. Springer, New York
O’Regan G (2014) Introduction to software quality. Springer, Cham
Software Engineering Institute (2006) CMMI executive overview. Presentation by the SEI
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O’Regan, G. (2018). CMMI and Software Process Improvement. In: The Innovation in Computing Companion. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02619-6_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02619-6_16
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