Software Development

CMMI Demystified
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Arbia_Siddique]Arbia Siddique

CMMI stands for Capability Maturity Model Integration. The main emphasis of CMMI is to achieve process improvement and help the organizations to gain maximum out of their existing processes by fine tuning them. Most of the people believe that CMMI benefits only large organizations but it is not true. If CMMI is implemented and followed properly then it can do wonders for your organization. CMMI might even be more beneficial to smaller businesses because it allows them to grow more consistently and to make changes when they are less costly, that is, “before growth demands them.”

Benefits of CMMI

Some of the benefits, which the organizations can reap after successful implementation of CMMI, are: -

• The quality of a system is highly influenced by the quality of the process used to acquire, develop, and maintain it.

• Process improvement increases product and service quality as organizations apply it to achieve their business objectives.

• Process improvement objectives are aligned with business objectives.

• More explicitly link management and engineering activities to their business objectives

• Expands the scope of and visibility into the product lifecycle and engineering activities to ensure that the product or service meets customer expectations

• Incorporates lessons learned from additional areas of best practice (e.g., measurement, risk management, and supplier management)

• Implements more robust high-maturity practices

• Addresses additional organizational functions critical to their products and services

• Compliance with relevant ISO standards

FAQs

How are CMMI models and constellations named?

Each CMMI constellation is given a name by the CMMI Product Team, which is then approved by the CMMI Steering Group.
The name of each model produced by a constellation consists of "CMMI" and the constellation name, followed by the names of the group of additions included. For example, a model in the Development constellation that does not have a group of additions is named CMMI for Development or CMMI-DEV. If the model has the IPPD group of additions, its name will be CMMI for Development +IPPD or CMMI-DEV +IPPD.

What is the difference between a "stakeholder" and a "relevant stakeholder"?

The term "stakeholder" is defined in CMMI models as
a group or individual who is affected by or is in some way accountable for the outcome of an undertaking.
The term "relevant stakeholder" is a subset of the term "stakeholder" and describes people or roles that are designated in a plan for stakeholder involvement.
Since "stakeholder" may describe a very large number of people, a lot of time and effort would be consumed by attempting to deal with all of them. For this reason, "relevant stakeholder" is used in most practice statements to describe the people identified to contribute to a specific task.
What is bidirectional traceability?
In the Requirements Management (REQM) process area, specific practice 1.4 states, "Maintain bidirectional traceability among the requirements and the project plans and work products." Bidirectional traceability is the ability to trace both forward and backward (i.e., from requirements to end products and from end product back to requirements).

Typically, traceability identifies the origin of items (e.g., customer needs) and follows these same items as they travel through the hierarchy of the Work Breakdown Structure to the project teams and eventually to the customer. When the requirements are managed well, bidirectional traceability is achieved from the source requirements to lower-level requirements and selected work products and verifications and then back to their source. Such bidirectional traceability helps determine that all source requirements have been completely addressed and that all lower level requirements and selected work products can be traced to a valid source.

When using a CMMI model for process improvement, is the use of functional analysis problematic for an object oriented approach?

The term "functional analysis" was used in CMMI to be universally applicable, and there is no intention to exclude an object oriented approach. In Requirements Development, specific practice 3.2, it says

The definition of functionality, also referred to as "functional analysis," is the description of what the product is intended to do. The definition of functionality can include actions, sequence, inputs, outputs, or other information that communicates the manner in which the product will be used.

Functional analysis is not the same as structured analysis in software development and does not presume a functionally oriented software design. In object-oriented software design, it relates to defining what are called "services" or "methods." The definition of functions, their logical groupings, and their association with requirements is referred to as a functional architecture.

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