History of CMM

The Capability Maturity Model was initially funded by military research. The United States Air Force funded a study at the Carnegie-Mellon Software Engineering Institute to create an abstract model for the military to use as an objective evaluation of software subcontractors. The result was the Capability Maturity Model, published as Managing the Software Process in 1989. The CMM is no longer supported by the SEI and has been superseded by the more comprehensive Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), of which version 1.2 has now been released.

Context

In the 1970s, technological improvements made computers more widespread, flexible, and inexpensive. Organizations began to adopt more and more computerized information systems and the field of software development grew significantly. This led to an increased demand for developers—and managers—which was satisfied with less experienced professionals.

Watts Humphrey's Capability Maturity Model (CMM) was described in the book Managing the Software Process (1989). The CMM as conceived by Watts Humphrey was based on the work a decade earlier of Phil Crosby who published the Quality Management Maturity Grid in his book Quality is Free in Active development of the model by the SEI (US Dept. of Defense Software Engineering Institute) began in 1986.

The CMM was originally intended as a tool to evaluate the ability of government contractors to perform a contracted software project. Though it comes from the area of software development, it can be, has been, and continues to be widely applied as a general model of the maturity of processes (e.g., IT Service Management processes) in IS/IT (and other) organizations.

Note that the first application of a staged maturity model to IT was not by CMM/SEI, but rather Richard L. Nolan in 1973.

The model identifies five levels of process maturity for an organisation:

1. Initial (chaotic, ad hoc, heroic) the starting point for use of a new process.
2. Repeatable (project management, process discipline) the process is used repeatedly.
3. Defined (institutionalized) the process is defined/confirmed as a standard business process.
4. Managed (quantified) process management and measurement takes place.
5. Optimising (process improvement) process management includes deliberate process optimization/improvement.

Within each of these maturity levels are KPAs (Key Process Areas) which characterise that level, and for each KPA there are five definitions identified:

1. Goals
2. Commitment
3. Ability
4. Measurement
5. Verification

The KPAs are not necessarily unique to CMM, representing — as they do — the stages that organizations must go through on the way to becoming mature.

The assessment is supposed to be led by an authorised lead assessor. One way in which companies are supposed to use the model is first to assess their maturity level and then form a specific plan to get to the next level. Skipping levels is not allowed.

N.B.: The CMM was originally intended as a tool to evaluate the ability of government contractors to perform a contracted software project. It may be suited for that purpose. When it became a general model for software process improvement, there were many critics.

"Shrinkwrap" companies are also called "COTS" or commercial-off-the-shelf firms or software package firms. They include Claris, Apple, Symantec, Microsoft, and Lotus, amongst others. Many such companies rarely if ever managed their requirements documents as formally as the CMM described in order to achieve level 2, and so all of these companies would probably fall into level 1 of the model.

In the 1980s, several military projects involving software subcontractors ran over-budget and were completed much later than planned, if they were completed at all. In an effort to determine why this was occurring, the United States Air Force funded a study at the SEI. The result of this study was a model for the military to use as an objective evaluation of software subcontractors. In 1989, the Capability Maturity Model was published as Managing the Software Process. The basis for the model is the Quality Management Maturity Grid introduced by Philip Crosby in his 1979 book 'Quality is Free'.