Comparison And Integration For Agile And CMMI Development Model

Software process improvement is very important for software management, it will affect the success of software project. Agile and CMMI are two kinds of process improvement model or methodology. Advantages and disadvantages of both model determines its complementary. Agile is lightweight model which is very flexible and could handle requirement change very well, but lack of stability. Agile usually applies for small project. CMMI is best practice, which could handle every aspect of project management, but lack of flexibility. CMMI usually applies for big project. For a long time, due to lack of realization and misuse for each other, Agile and CMMI can not integrate together. This situation could has very bad impact on software industry. In the actual work, the project manager often select only one of them, although individual one can not meet all the requirements for project management. There could be great limitation for software project management. Based on practice, we can prove single model is difficult to handle all the requirements for the project. Hence, in recent years, research on how to integrate the two models for project management has become a pressing issue. Expert, scholar and project manager hope the integration of both models could improve CMMI’s agility and Agile’s maturity, and improve management level finally. The result of the integration could improve software development progress, product quality and customer satisfaction. Author expects, the way to integrate the two models could be found, and prove the integration is feasible.The author analyzes the advantage and disadvantage based on actual working experience and demonstrates the integration of the two models could improve the management level. When the organization with high maturity needs to be more flexible to handle requirement change, it seems that CMMI can not provide enough support. But integration with simplification and lean thinking could improve the speed of response, optimize training, assessment process and make organization more agile to solve the problem. When the rapidly growing organization with high agility needs to be more mature, it seems that Agile model can not provide support well. But analyzing the CMMI gap to find out the potential weaknesses and targeted optimization could make organization more mature to handle the problem. Through these two methodological researches and the integration of practice, this article demonstrates that in reasonable cases and eliminate misuse of these two methodologies, integration of CMMI and Agile is entirely feasible. Furthermore, project management level could be improved due to the integration. In actual work, the integration has already benefited some organization. The ways to integrate CMMI and Agile in this article are just small part of this field. Author believes according to the trend of the integration, there will be more areas to be integrated and project management level will benefit from this.