Abstract
The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) is a federally funded research and development centre located at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in the United States. It was founded by the United States Congress in 1984, and it has worked closely with industry and academia in advancing software engineering practices around the world. It opened a European office in Germany in 2004.
It performs research to find solutions to key software engineering problems, and its proposed solutions are then validated through industrial pilots. These solutions are then disseminated to the wider software engineering community through its training programme. The SEI’s research and maturity models have played an important role in helping companies to deliver high-quality software consistently on time and on budget.
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Notes
- 1.
Discipline amplification is a specialised piece of information that is relevant to a particular discipline. It is introduced in the model by text such as “For Systems Engineering”.
- 2.
Our focus is on the implementation of the staged representation of the CMMI rather than the continuous representation, as it provides a clearly defined roadmap for process improvement, and it also allows benchmarking of organisations.
- 3.
Of course, 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 commercial organisation. For example, the Motorola plant in India was appraised at CMM level 5 in the late 1990s while Motorola lost business opportunities in the GSM market.
- 4.
A SCAMPI appraisal is a systematic examination of the processes in an organisation to determine the maturity of the organisation with respect to the CMMI. It consists of interviews with management and reviews with project teams. The appraisers will review documentation and determine the extent to which the processes defined are effective and institutionalised in the organisation.
- 5.
The appraisal team could be the CMMI project manager only (if the project manager is a SCAMPI-trained appraiser); alternatively, it could be an external appraiser and the CMMI project manager. A SCAMPI Class A appraisal could involve a large team of 4–9 appraisers (including a SCAMPI lead appraiser) for a large organisation. There is a strict qualification process to become a SCAMPI lead appraiser, and it requires attending the official SEI CMMI and SCAMPI training and conducting two appraisals under the direction of a qualified SCAMPI lead appraiser.
- 6.
The type of output to be provided is agreed in discussions between the appraisal sponsor and the appraisal leader. The output may just be the strengths and improvement opportunities identified. In other cases, the ratings may just be of the specific and generic goals rather than of the practices.
References
Chrissis MB, Conrad M, Shrum S (2011) CMMI. Guidelines for process integration and product improvement, 2011th edn, SEI series in software engineering. Addison Wesley, Boston
Humphry W (1989) Managing the software process. Addison Wesley, Reading
O’Regan G (2002) A practical approach to software quality. Springer, New York
O’Regan G (2010) Introduction to software process improvement. Springer, London
O’Regan G (2014) Introduction to software quality. Springer, Cham
Standard CMMI Appraisal method for process improvement. CMU/SEI-2006-V1.2, August 2006
Software Engineering Institute (2009) CMMI impact. Presentation by Anita Carleton, August 2009
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O’Regan, G. (2015). Software Engineering Institute (SEI). In: Pillars of Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21464-1_30
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21464-1_30
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