The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) is a development model created in 1986 after a study of data collected from organizations that contracted with the U.S. Department of Defense, who funded the research. The term "maturity" relates to the degree of formality and optimization of processes, from ad hoc practices, to formally defined steps, to managed result metrics, to active optimization of the processes.
The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) is an American research and development center headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Its activities cover cybersecurity, software assurance, software engineering and acquisition, and component capabilities critical to the United States Department of Defense.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to software engineering:
In software project management, software testing, and software engineering, verification and validation (V&V) is the process of checking that a software system meets specifications and requirements so that it fulfills its intended purpose. It may also be referred to as software quality control. It is normally the responsibility of software testers as part of the software development lifecycle. In simple terms, software verification is: "Assuming we should build X, does our software achieve its goals without any bugs or gaps?" On the other hand, software validation is: "Was X what we should have built? Does X meet the high-level requirements?"
ISO/IEC 15504Information technology – Process assessment, also termed Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination (SPICE), is a set of technical standards documents for the computer software development process and related business management functions. It is one of the joint International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) standards, which was developed by the ISO and IEC joint subcommittee, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 7.
The Personal Software Process (PSP) is a structured software development process that is designed to help software engineers better understand and improve their performance by bringing discipline to the way they develop software and tracking their predicted and actual development of the code. It clearly shows developers how to manage the quality of their products, how to make a sound plan, and how to make commitments. It also offers them the data to justify their plans. They can evaluate their work and suggest improvement direction by analyzing and reviewing development time, defects, and size data. The PSP was created by Watts Humphrey to apply the underlying principles of the Software Engineering Institute's (SEI) Capability Maturity Model (CMM) to the software development practices of a single developer. It claims to give software engineers the process skills necessary to work on a team software process (TSP) team.
Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is a process level improvement training and appraisal program. Administered by the CMMI Institute, a subsidiary of ISACA, it was developed at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). It is required by many U.S. Government contracts, especially in software development. CMU claims CMMI can be used to guide process improvement across a project, division, or an entire organization. CMMI defines the following maturity levels for processes: Initial, Managed, Defined, Quantitatively Managed, and Optimizing. Version 2.0 was published in 2018. CMMI is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by CMU.
Quality management ensures that an organization, product or service is consistent. It has four main components: quality planning, quality assurance, quality control and quality improvement. Quality management is focused not only on product and service quality, but also on the means to achieve it. Quality management, therefore, uses quality assurance and control of processes as well as products to achieve more consistent quality. Quality control is also part of Quality Management. What a customer wants and is willing to pay for it, determines quality. It is a written or unwritten commitment to a known or unknown consumer in the market. Thus, quality can be defined as fitness for intended use or, in other words, how well the product performs its intended function.
Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) is a set of principles, models, disciplines, concepts, and guidelines for delivering information technology services from Microsoft. MSF is not limited to developing applications only; it is also applicable to other IT projects like deployment, networking or infrastructure projects. MSF does not force the developer to use a specific methodology.
The Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) defines a Process Area as, "A cluster of related practices in an area that, when implemented collectively, satisfies a set of goals considered important for making improvement in that area." Both CMMI for Development v1.3 and CMMI for Acquisition v1.3 identify 22 process areas, whereas CMMI for Services v1.3 identifies 24 process areas. Many of the process areas are the same in these three models.
Capability Immaturity Model (CIMM) in software engineering is a parody acronym, a semi-serious effort to provide a contrast to the Capability Maturity Model (CMM). The Capability Maturity Model is a five point scale of capability in an organization, ranging from random processes at level 1 to fully defined, managed and optimized processes at level 5. The ability of an organization to carry out its mission on time and within budget is claimed to improve as the CMM level increases.
Within project management, scrum, sometimes written Scrum or SCRUM, is a framework for developing, delivering, and sustaining products in a complex environment, with an initial emphasis on software development, although it has been used in other fields including research, sales, marketing and advanced technologies. It is designed for teams of ten or fewer members, who break their work into goals that can be completed within time-boxed iterations, called sprints, no longer than one month and most commonly two weeks. The scrum team assess progress in time-boxed daily meetings of 15 minutes or less, called daily scrums. At the end of the sprint, the team holds two further meetings: the sprint review which demonstrates the work done to stakeholders to elicit feedback, and sprint retrospective which enables the team to reflect and improve.
A Software Engineering Process Group (SEPG) is an organization's focal point for software process improvement activities. These individuals perform assessments of organizational capability, develop plans to implement needed improvements, coordinate the implementation of those plans, and measure the effectiveness of these efforts. Successful SEPGs require specialized skills and knowledge of many areas outside traditional software engineering.
The Standard CMMI Appraisal Method for Process Improvement (SCAMPI) is the official Software Engineering Institute (SEI) method to provide benchmark-quality ratings relative to Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) models. SCAMPI appraisals are used to identify strengths and weaknesses of current processes, reveal development/acquisition risks, and determine capability and maturity level ratings. They are mostly used either as part of a process improvement program or for rating prospective suppliers. The method defines the appraisal process as consisting of preparation; on-site activities; preliminary observations, findings, and ratings; final reporting; and follow-on activities.
In combination with the personal software process (PSP), the team software process (TSP) provides a defined operational process framework that is designed to help teams of managers and engineers organize projects and produce software for products that range in size from small projects of several thousand lines of code (KLOC) to very large projects greater than half a million lines of code. The TSP is intended to improve the levels of quality and productivity of a team's software development project, in order to help them better meet the cost and schedule commitments of developing a software system.
A glossary of terms relating to project management and consulting.
Lean IT is the extension of lean manufacturing and lean services principles to the development and management of information technology (IT) products and services. Its central concern, applied in the context of IT, is the elimination of waste, where waste is work that adds no value to a product or service.
In software engineering, a software development process is a process of dividing software development work into smaller, parallel, or sequential steps or sub-processes to improve design, product management. It is also known as a software development life cycle (SDLC). The methodology may include the pre-definition of specific deliverables and artifacts that are created and completed by a project team to develop or maintain an application.
Disciplined agile delivery (DAD) is the software development portion of the Disciplined Agile Toolkit. DAD enables teams to make simplified process decisions around incremental and iterative solution delivery. DAD builds on the many practices espoused by advocates of agile software development, including scrum, agile modeling, lean software development, and others.
Tudor IT Process Assessment (TIPA®) is a methodological framework for process assessment. Its first version was published in 2003 by the Public Research Centre Henri Tudor based in Luxembourg. TIPA is now a registered trademark of the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST). TIPA offers a structured approach to determine process capability compared to recognized best practices. TIPA also supports process improvement by providing a gap analysis and proposing improvement recommendations.
