Abstract:

Companies targeting CMMI Level 3 maturity have been adapting different techniques depending on their resources, culture and experience. The outcome and ROI of the improvement work are largely determined by the team’s approach of addressing CMMI requirements. There are a number of traps on the way to Level 3 maturity and teams need to be on guard to avoid the pitfalls of common mistakes. In the last two years, we have been involved in process improvement projects of 10 small sized companies (20-100) all targeting Level 3 maturity. Our involvement has ranged from workshop organization to management of improvement projects. Some of these initiatives have proved to be quite satisfactory both for the management and for the developers. However there are others that still struggle with performing issues. In this presentation we provide a summary of different approaches adapted by these companies in terms of team structure and size, in-house expertise, management involvement, technology utilization and involvement of outside experts. Based on a set of common aspects we categorize the different paths that have been followed for CMMI Level 3 maturity into five groups. We also include a comparison of the approaches based on effort, schedule, cost, and on the tangible and intangible results. The improvement initiatives have provided a rich set of observations regarding to the daily work of SEPG teams and the decisions they need to take on their quest to Level 3. We provide a summary of these observations, and how they affect the outcome of the overall project. Finally we suggest an approach for small sized companies for achieving CMMI Level 3 maturity synthesized from our work including process architecture, and guidelines for technology support.