Organisational readiness and software process improvement

Abstract

The Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is a structured representation of software development processes that can support an organisation's software process improvement (SPI) strategies. However, CMMI and SPI initiatives generally exhibit low levels of adoption and limited success. One of the major reasons for these shortcomings is that many organisations undertake SPI initiatives without knowing whether or not they are ready to undertake them. Our previous research has enabled us to develop a software process improvement readiness model/framework to address this problem. This paper reports on the implementation of the SPI readiness model in three large-scale case studies. We have found that organisations with higher CMMI levels are more ready for SPI initiatives than organisations with low CMMI levels. We suggest that organisations at higher CMMI levels have developed capabilities that enable them to further leverage SPI than organisations at lower CMMI levels. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007