Mapping an industry standard capability model to an organization's software development processes and practices

Software engineering organizations face many challenges in providing quality software on time and within budget. Models, such as the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity ModelRTM Integration (CMMI), have been developed to provide software development organizations a framework for assessing their processes and practices in addressing such challenges. The Software Engineering Institute has been promoting a shift in philosophy and practice from a discovery approach to verification when conducting a CMMI appraisal. This shift may improve appraisal performance by allowing appraisers to reuse the results of prior appraisals and thereby reduce rediscovery of earlier, demonstrated findings. This dissertation reports on an applied project in which, unlike an extended research project, I took an idea and applied it to a specific situation. It addressed how a particular organization could capture current findings for later use. A case study in this organization was conducted to map a CMMI model to its processes, practices, and work products instead of the more common technique of mapping the organization's compliance with the model. This organization has had several internal assessments in the last decade in order to help determine which process improvement activities would be the most effective in improving on-time delivery of quality software products. Each assessment involved the cost of an outside consultant while two of them involved a different consultant. Each assessment started "from scratch," which resulted in the rediscovery of prior findings. The organization's process documentation and work product library were already stored in a database and this was used to store and maintain a mapped model reference tag directly within the documented process or the work product library. A rating of compliance with the model was included in each reference tag. Using a database and reporting tools, a report was generated in real time to show the organization's current process capability. This project applied the concept in only one organization. Further work would be needed to determine if this was a unique situation or whether the approach applied here would be successful in other organizations.