Trillium Model

Last updated

The Trillium Model, created by a collaborative team from Bell Canada, Northern Telecom and Bell Northern Research (Northern Telecom and Bell Northern Research later merged into Nortel Networks) combines requirements from the ISO 9000 series, the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) for software, and the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence Archived 2016-08-04 at the Wayback Machine , with software quality standards from the IEEE. Trillium has a telecommunications orientation and provides customer focus. The practices in the Trillium Model are derived from a benchmarking exercise which focused on all practices that would contribute to an organization's product development and support capability. The Trillium Model covers all aspects of the software development life-cycle, most system and product development and support activities, and a significant number of related marketing activities. Many of the practices described in the model can be applied directly to hardware development.

Contents

Objectives

The Trillium Model has been developed from a customer perspective, as perceived in a competitive, commercial environment. The Model is used in a variety of ways:

This Model and its accompanying tools are not in themselves a product development process or life-cycle model. Rather, the Trillium Model provides key industry best practices which can be used to improve an existing process or life-cycle

Scale

The Trillium scale spans levels 1 through 5. Levels can be characterized in the following way:

  1. Unstructured: The development process is ad hoc. Projects often cannot meet quality or schedule targets. Success, while possible, is based on individuals rather than on organizational infrastructure. (Risk – High)
  2. Repeatable and Project Oriented: Individual project success is achieved through strong project management planning and control, with emphasis on requirements management, estimation techniques, and configuration management. (Risk – Medium)
  3. Defined and Process Oriented: Processes are defined and used at the organizational level, although project customization is still permitted. Processes are controlled and improved. ISO 9001 requirements such as training and internal process auditing are incorporated. (Risk – Low)
  4. Managed and Integrated: Process instrumentation and analysis is used as a key mechanism for process improvement. Process change management and defect prevention programs are integrated into processes. CASE tools are integrated into processes. (Risk – Lower)
  5. Fully Integrated: Formal methodologies are extensively used. Organizational repositories for development history and process are used and effective. (Risk – Lowest)

Architecture

The Trillium Model consists of Capability Areas, Roadmaps and Practices. There are four different ways in which the Trillium Model is typically applied.

The Capability Evaluation and Capability Joint-Assessment are two methods of evaluating an organization's product development and support process capability. A Capability Evaluation is the evaluation of a supplier by a second party, typically the customer. A Capability Joint Evaluation assumes an effective partnership relationship exists between the customer and supplier.

Benefits

For Customer organizations, a higher capability means that:

For the Development organization, achieving a higher capability can result in:

Comparison with CMM

The Trillium Model covers all aspects of the software development life-cycle, most system and product development and support activities, and a significant number of related marketing activities. Although Trillium has been designed to be applied to embedded software systems such as telecommunications systems, much of the model can be applied to other segments of the software industry such as management information systems (MIS). The various differences between the Trillium Model and the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) as given as follow:

  1. Trillium architecture is based on roadmaps, rather than key process areas (KPAs) present in CMM
  2. Trillium has a wider product perspective rather than only based on software process improvement
  3. Trillium claims a wider coverage of capability impacting issues.
  4. Trillium has orientation towards customer focus, technological maturity and telecommunication industry.

Related Research Articles

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.

A software company is an organisation — owned either by the state or private — established for profit whose primary products are various forms of software, software technology, distribution, and software product development. They make up the software industry.

In business and engineering, product development or new product development covers the complete process of bringing a new product to market, renewing an existing product and introducing a product in a new market. A central aspect of NPD is product design, along with various business considerations. New product development is described broadly as the transformation of a market opportunity into a product available for sale. The products developed by an organisation provide the means for it to generate income. For many technology-intensive firms their approach is based on exploiting technological innovation in a rapidly changing market.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to software engineering:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Systems development life cycle</span> Systems engineering terms

In systems engineering, information systems and software engineering, the systems development life cycle (SDLC), also referred to as the application development life cycle, is a process for planning, creating, testing, and deploying an information system. The SDLC concept applies to a range of hardware and software configurations, as a system can be composed of hardware only, software only, or a combination of both. There are usually six stages in this cycle: requirement analysis, design, development and testing, implementation, documentation, and evaluation.

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.

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.

Quality management ensures that an organization, product or service consistently functions well. 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. Quality can be defined as how well the product performs its intended function.

The Application Services Library (ASL) is a public domain framework of best practices used to standardize processes within Application Management, the discipline of producing and maintaining information systems and applications. The term "library" is used because ASL is presented as a set of books describing best practices from the IT industry.

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.

People Capability Maturity Model is a maturity framework that focuses on continuously improving the management and development of the human assets of an organization. It describes an evolutionary improvement path from ad hoc, inconsistently performed practices, to a mature, disciplined, and continuously improving development of the knowledge, skills, and motivation of the workforce that enhances strategic business performance.

An independent test organization is an organization, person, or company that tests products, materials, software, etc. according to agreed requirements. The test organization can be affiliated with the government or universities or can be an independent testing laboratory. They are independent because they are not affiliated with the producer nor the user of the item being tested: no commercial bias is present. These "contract testing" facilities are sometimes called "third party" testing or evaluation facilities.

ISO/IEC 21827 is an international standard based on the Systems Security Engineering Capability Maturity Model (SSE-CMM) developed by the International Systems Security Engineering Association (ISSEA). ISO/IEC 21827 specifies the Systems Security Engineering - Capability Maturity Model, which describes the characteristics essential to the success of an organization's security engineering process, and is applicable to all security engineering organizations including government, commercial, and academic. ISO/IEC 21827 does not prescribe a particular process or sequence, but captures practices generally observed in industry. The model is a standard metric for security engineering practices covering the following:

A glossary of terms relating to project management and consulting.

In software engineering, a software development process or software development life cycle (SDLC) is a process of planning and managing software development. It typically involves dividing software development work into smaller, parallel, or sequential steps or sub-processes to improve design and/or product management. 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.

The Open Source Maturity Model (OMM) is a methodology for assessing Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) and more specifically the FLOSS development process. This methodology is released under the Creative Commons license.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">In-Step BLUE</span>

in-STEP BLUE is a project management software program developed and sold by microTOOL GmbH, based in Berlin, Germany. It is designed to assist project managers in developing plans, assigning resources to tasks, tracking progress, managing budgets, requirements, changes and risks as well as analyzing workloads. The tool automatically stores all project results in a central repository shared by all users. Individual project management methods can be supported as well as the agile method Scrum, official methods like the British PRINCE2, the German V-Model XT, the Swiss HERMES method and methods for the automotive industry according to ISO/IEC 15504, also known as SPICE.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to project management:

Bill Curtis is a software engineer best known for leading the development of the Capability Maturity Model and the People CMM in the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and for championing the spread of software process improvement and software measurement globally. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for his contributions to software process improvement and measurement. He was named to the 2022 class of ACM Fellows, "for contributions to software process, software measurement, and human factors in software engineering".

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.