The Process Improvement Model: CMM

Abstract

The Capability Maturity Model for Software is a model for building organizational capability that has been widely adopted in the software community and beyond. The methodology of this model focuses on determining current process maturity in an organization and then identifying issues that are critical to the software quality and process improvements. Therefore, the CMM supports the theory that focusing on key issues and activities can steadily improve the software process capabilities throughout an organization. This framework is composed of 5 maturity levels that measure the maturity of an organizations software processes and evaluates the software. The Software CMM is a five-level model that describes good engineering and management practices and prescribes improvement priorities for software organizations. This paper stresses the need for a process maturity framework to prioritize improvement actions, describes the process maturity framework of five maturity levels and the associated structural components

Keywords: capability maturity model, CMM, process maturity framework, software process improvement, maturity level, key process area.