Software Project Management

With the increasing push by the U.S. government to verify that their subcontractors have achieved certain Capability Maturity Model (CMM) levels, there is an increased need to understand the workings of the CMM. Judy Bamberger states “the CMM is one of the most misunderstood pieces of technical literature in existence. ” [Bemberger] This paper will be an attempt to de-fog the CMM language and help the reader achieve a better understanding of it. After several decades of missed deadlines, overrun budgets and sub-par quality products, software developers realized that mismanagement of the software process was their primary shortfall. This realization started the research initiative that led to the CMM. In late 1986, the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and Mitre Corporation began development of a process maturity framework that would enable software process improvement by developers. This framework was released by SEI in a September 1987 description document. [Humphrey 1] Since the SEI was a government funded organization, they could not evaluate private organizations. This situation led to the development of the software-process assessment and the software-process evaluation. They also developed a maturity questionnaire to appraise software process maturity. [Humphrey 2] After four years of experience with the process maturity framework, the SEI evolved it into the CMM. This evolution was consummated by the release of version 1.0 of the CMM in 1991