What is Capability Maturity Model Integration?

Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) refers to a process level improvement training as well as an appraisal program that is administered by the CMMI Institute, which is an affiliate of ISACA. 

The CMMI is a tool to evaluate the maturity of an organization in terms of process development. Generally, it is used to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of how processes are being managed. The program was developed at Carnegie Mellon University. Usually, it's a requirement by various United States Department of Defense as well as the U.S. Government contracts, particularly when it comes to software development.

How does Capability Maturity Model Integration Work?
 

In many professional cases, CMU claims can be utilized in guiding process improvement in a project, division, as well as an entire organization. The program defines some maturing levels for processes namely:

• 0 - Lack of Management: Processes and their management is completely chaotic.
• 1 - Initial: Processes are implemented ad hoc.
• 2 - Repeated: Compliance with the discipline necessary to perform basic repetitive processes.
• 3 - Defined: The processes of the organization are documented.
• 4 - Managed: The processes are managed and carried out to measure their performance through KPI.
• 5 - Optimized: Processes are continually improved, there is an innovation cycle for processes and management.

Version 2.0 was written and published in 2018 while Version 1.3 was launched in 2010. The reference model for the remaining data is in this wiki article. Its important to note that CMMI is registered and patented in the U.S. by the Trademark Office.

CMMI addresses the following three main areas of interest:

• Product as well as service development CMMI for Development (CMMI-DEV)
• Service establishment and management- CMMI for Services (CMMI-SVC)
• Product and service acquisition- CMMI for Acquisition CMMI for Acquisition (CMMI-ACQ)

In the second version (2.0), the three key areas that initially had a separate model were combined into one model. As such, CMMI was created by a group from the industry, the government, in addition to a prominent Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at CMU. CMMI models offer guidance for emerging or improving processes that have come to meet the objectives of an organization. A model of CMMI can also be utilized as a framework through which an organization appraises its maturity. As of January 2013, the whole of the CMMI product line transferred from the SEI to the CMMI Institution, which is a new organization situated at Carnegie Mellon. CMMI emerged from software engineering. However, it has been generalized to embrace different critical areas of interest including the development and creation of hardware products, the delivery of different kinds of services, as well as the acquisition of products alongside services. In this case, software doesn't appear in the definitions of CMMI. Therefore, the generalization of improvement concepts makes the program abstract. It's also important to note that it's not as particular to software engineering as CMM Software. Moreover, users should note that CMMI is a business model and not a standard. As such, for every area of practice, it capitalizes a general intent as well as different levels of maturity in terms of abstract. However, it doesn't offer a prescription of how to acquire the stated levels. It provides detailed abstract data and various examples that often serve as guidelines for getting to understand and implement various programs.

Applications of CMMI
 

According to the SEI publication, approximately 60 organizations registered increased performance in the categories of cost, schedule as well as productivity and quality. The median increase in organization performance varied from 14 percent to 62 percent in terms of customer satisfaction and productivity respectively. But, the CMMI model profoundly deals with the processes that should be implemented and less with how the implementation should be handled. These results don't guarantee that the application of CMMI will increase the performance of an organization in every case. A small company that has few resources could less likely benefit from CMMI. Various maturity processes across different profiles support this theory. Also, of all small businesses, approximately 25 employees are assessed. This implies that 70 percent go through the level two assessments while 52 percent of a company with about 2,000 employees is rated at the highest level of the evaluation. In a research proposal to establish the impact of CMMI to a business, Turner and Jain weigh in that even though it's pretty apparent that there is a vast difference between CMMI and conventional development software, both approaches have a lot in common. Therefore, they believe that neither way seems like the right one when it comes to developing software. Nonetheless, there are certain phases in a project where one element is needed since they are best suited. Additionally, the duo suggests that organizations should merge these processes of the available methods into a revolutionary hybrid method. Sutherland et al. (2007) reiterate that a combination of Scrum, as well as CMMI, may result in more adaptability as well as predictability that when only one process is implemented. On the other hand, David J. Anderson (2005) provides hints regarding how to interpret the CMMI program responsively. CMMI Roadmaps are objective oriented roadmaps as they have an approach to selecting as well as deploying relevant process areas from the parent model. This can offer guidance as well as a focus for the effective adoption of CMMI. With that said, CMMI roadmaps come in many forms for the continuous representation of various organizations and their projects. Every program has a set of improvement objectives. As such, CMMI has a continuous pattern of roadmaps for progressive representation. Some of the examples of CMMI roadmaps are such as CMMI Product as well as Product Integration Roadmaps as well as the CMMI Process Alongside Measurement Roadmaps. Such roadmaps merge all the strengths of staged as well as stagnant and continuous representations. Also, the combination of these project management techniques and systems is earned through value management with CMMI as described by (Solomon 2002). For an organization to conclude with the similar application of the use of CMMI, Extreme Programming, which is a software engineering method, has been monitored with CMM/CMMI (Nawrocki et al., 2002). For instance, the XP requirements management technique relies on oral communication. It was evaluated as not compatible with CMMI. Other than that, the appraisal of CMMI can occur through different approaches namely staged and continuous. While the staged method can yield the results of the assessment on a scale of one to five, the constant approach seeks to produce the results of one of four levels of capability. The differences in such procedures are often felt in the appraisal. Some of the best practices are equal and the result in equivalent process improvement results.